“[Y]ou may take up a book in time,” Ackroyd continues, “but you read it in eternity.” In an Ackroydian sense, Zagajewski’s books are true, of their era and eternal.Even when it does not literally rhyme, great poetry rhymes. “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” was deftly translated by the acclaimed translator and Northwestern University professor Clare Cavanagh, as are the poems in Zagajewski’s latest and last book, True Life, published posthumously. His work was banned in Poland in 1975, leading eventually to his living in exile from 1982 to 2002. As he grew older and his poetry began to move in a less blunt and more ineffable direction, Zagajewski retained that sense of wisdom, and True Life radiates that belief in the revolutionary nature of trying to understand. Whether one finds the assertion true or false in a universal sense, in his own broad senses of time and space, Zagajewski himself was a poet who did live everywhere, and who, thanks to such books as True Life, will continue to do so.

Source: CBC News February 19, 2023 16:03 UTC