ABSTRACT
“Suddenly you see the world lit differently,” writes the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski in Mysticism for Beginners, a collection mostly selected from Ziemia Ognista (The Fiery Land, 1994) and translated with characteristic smoothness by Clare Cavanagh. (Among other poetry books in English, Tremor and Canvas have previously appeared, and Without End: New and Selected Poems was brought out by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2003.) This declaration sums up well the engaging movement of these meditative poems, which meander gently toward moments of enlightenment. Informed by exile and travel (Zagajewski long divided his time between Paris and Houston), as well as by respect for everyday life, his longer poems especially search not so much for severed Polish roots as for insight and wisdom—wherever he is. In “Letter from a Reader,” which seemingly defines his own aims, he tells himself to attend to “the endless patience / of the light.” Metaphors involving light and darkness (or shadow) indeed appear frequently, with the hope tendered that this miraculous light can sometimes—as he remarks apropos of Vermeer’s “Little Girl”—inhabit a work of art.
