Review of Unseen Hand by Adam Zagajewski

Unseen Hand by Adam Zagajewski (translated by Clare Cavanagh)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,  2011 $23.00 (hardback
Reviewed by James Crews

 
In his latest collection, Unseen Hand, Adam Zagajewski once again interrogates the terrain of memory and aftermath, joy and pain, with his hard-won, welcome brand of ambivalence. In “Improvisation,” for instance, he writes: “Why lie? Rapture, after all,/ lives only in the imagination and quickly vanishes.” But then, as often happens in these poems richly layered with uncertainty and moments of quiet surprise, Zagajewski begins to doubt his own assertions:

Perhaps, though, there are hidden things before us
and in them sorrow blends with enthusiasm,
always, daily, like the birth of dawn
on the seashore . . .

Most readers will forever associate Zagajewski with his poem, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” reprinted and circulated after the events of 9/11 as it seemed to offer a context, an acknowledgment that even in the midst of the brokenness of war and death, there are still some simple things we “must” praise. In order to praise, however, one has to see clearly, and  there is no question that this poet is a fierce observer of himself—his mind, his past—and of others as well. He wonders at times if the world has been paying enough attention as in “Cafe”:

The Soviet cosmonauts claimed they didn’t find
God in outer space, but did they look?

From the vantage point of what he calls the “vita contemplativa” (“Happiness. A moment within an hour”), Zagajewski also finds an intense solitude while exploring the locales of his youth—his birthplace of Lvov, Poland as well as Krakow, Gilwice, Joseph Street and the River Garonne. It’s a great relief to read a writer these days so unafraid of locating his poems in time and space, for to gloss over the places that have helped shape us is to risk a special kind of amnesia. And as this book moves back and forth between America and Poland, France and Germany, Zagajewski even goes so far as to include italics just after some titles, telling his readers exactly where or when (“I’m eight years old”) a poem is occurring. In fact, before we even begin reading “Silhouettes,” his italics reassure us and the speaker himself, it seems—“Mr. Sobertin, Mr. Romer—They existed, they lived.

Zagajewski and fellow Polish poet, Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska, both employ straightforward, almost reportorial language, and they share a translator as well—the wonderful Clare Cavanagh, who has lovingly ushered the poems of Unseen Hand into crystal-clear English. But though the two poets both delight in observing others, Zagajewski shows little of Szymborska’s bird’s-eye-view detachment from her subjects. His is the project of re-creating the events and landmarks of his own life in order to better understand the rest of us as we go about our daily tasks:

I thought that the city is built not of houses,
squares, boulevards, parks, wide streets,
but of faces gleaming like lamps,
like the torches of welders, who mend
steel in clouds of sparks at night.

He knows that the personal, peculiar details of a given life complicate our relationship with the world and with those we have loved and perhaps lost. We often move so quickly from rapture to despair and back again, and if Zagajewski cannot quite tell us why, he at least tries to show us how those two seemingly opposite impulses have moved through him over the years. With “Self-Portrait in an Airplane” (“In Economy Class,” the italics tell us), he describes the struggle toward some inner peace “in the narrow seat”:

I hold my head in my hands
as if shielding it from annihilation.
Seen from outside I doubtless
seem immobile, almost dead,
resigned, deserving sympathy.
But it’s not so—I’m free,
maybe even happy.
Yes, I hold my heavy head
in my hands,
but inside it a poem is being born.

Few poets, it seems, can write so honestly (and accurately) about the act of making poems or being a poet, but Zagajewski—perhaps because of his precise language and of course his experience—gets away with it over and over again. In “Metaphor,” “the very old poet in the hotel bar” lists the many ways poetry simply cannot replicate real life:

 . . . the things we love, the unseen things,
take flesh, of course, in what can
be seen and said, though never
absolutely, one to one,
so it follows that there’s always a little too much
or a little too little, the seams remain on the surface . . .

Somehow, Zagajewski manages to own the artifice of the act while also taking us deeply into a moment, into the mind that fashions the moment. In “Writing Poems,” he shows a poet engaged with his art, feeling both joy and doubt as he finally reaches the inevitable conviction that “everything passes”:

Writing poems is a duel
that no one wins—on one side
a shadow rises, massive as a mountain range
viewed by a butterfly, on the other,
only brief glimpses of brightness,
images and thoughts like a match flame
on the night when winter is born in pain.

He calls what he finds “brief glimpses of brightness,” though one might argue after reading Unseen Hand, that these “glimpses” are bound to endure far longer than the “match flame” that momentarily mitigates both darkness and cold. There is much pain threaded through this book too—lost parents and loved ones and litanies of atrocities—but within each poem is the abiding beauty of the everyday as Zagajewski mines each memory, each moment for a redemption that might last no longer than a line or two, but which conspires with humor and sadness and ecstasy to create some semblance of truth in a world ruled by “unseen things” we can scarcely imagine.