A recent kerfuffle over the 2008 Governor General’s Award for poetry reflected the tightness of the poetry community in Canada. One of the judges, poet Di Brandt, was both a co-editor and a subject of one of the winning volume’s poems.
Though the conflict of interest inherent in judging work with which you are intimately involved made the news, one wondered how many Canadian readers reached for the prize-winning book, Jacob Scheier’s More to Keep Us Warm, whether for its literary or newsworthy qualities.
The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski commented recently on poetry’s contemporary predicament. Of a visit to Paris he wrote: “In the subway cars, many people are reading thick novels, even during rush hour, when cramped passengers who -couldn’t find a seat hover over the reader’s head. Paris is after all the capital of the novel… On the other hand, poetry fares poorly in Paris. It’s true that you often see posters with brief poems in the subway cars… But I don’t think anyone gives them a second glance; absorbed in their thick novels, the passengers don’t see them and don’t want to see them.”
Though Zagajewski has been compared to major figures from an earlier generation, including the Nobel laureates Czeslaw Milosz and Pablo Neruda, his work is not as well known in North America. His new collection, Eternal Enemies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), is a slim but fine testament to the marvels of the poet’s craft.
Unlike a novel (Canadians, it’s often said, like theirs fat) Eternal Enemies is easily read in one sitting. Its recurrent themes are not difficult to catalogue: travel; the effect of cities, towns and countryside on the imagination; literary lives; the political and cultural legacies of postwar Poland.
Zagajewski was born in Lvov, but he writes most intimately of Krakow, the most beautiful city in Poland and one of Europe’s treasures. His urban portraits express an old-fashioned nostalgia, and are most often tied to a personal sense of yearning or loss:
I returned to the city of sweet cakes,
bitter chocolate, and lovely funerals
(a grain of hope was once buried here),
the city of starched memory –
Like many intellectuals and artists in postwar Poland, Zagajewski’s musings are haunted by the country’s absent Jews. His meditation on a major landmark in Krakow, the Church of Corpus Christi, begins:
We’re next to the Jewish Quarter,
where mindful prayers rose
in another tongue, the speech of David,
which is like a nut, a cluster of grapes.
And a poem dedicated to the postwar theatrical avant-gardist Tadeusz Kantor leads Zagajewski to consider “what it means to be a Jew, a German, or a Pole, or maybe just human…” The challenge of remaining “human” in postwar Poland is given the ironic treatment often found in the views of those who grew up under Stalin. In his youth, Zagajewski tells us:
…the pockmarked
Georgian still lived and reigned,
with his grim henchmen and theories.
Those were years of memory and grief,
of sober talks and silence…
In a more overtly comic poem called The Power Cinema, the paradoxes of culture under the Soviets are evoked:
The screen in the Power Cinema was happy to receive
every film and every image –
the Indians felt right at home,
but Soviet heroes
were no less welcome.
After each showing a silence fell,
so deep that the police got nervous.
Short passages do not do Zagajewski’s poems justice, yet his method is to present a major theme, a memory or setting in a few stanzas, using short lines and concrete images. His voice is intimate, and his life as a Polish youth and itinerant intellectual (Zagajewski divides his time between Texas and Poland) is portrayed with force and clarity. Motifs evocative of the poet’s time and place recur: the “electric trams” that survive in Polish cities from an earlier time; the “fat priest,” somehow both a relic and emblematic; the “scrawny” and “drowsy” cats inhabiting neighbourhoods that continue to accommodate a certain wildness and unpredictability.
The poet’s challenge is to make all this particular material rich and open to a reader who may only encounter it on the page. At this Zagajewski is expert. Most of us will recognize something in the sort of paternal memory evoked by the epigram that introduces In a Little Apartment: “I ask my father, ‘What do you do all day?’ ‘I remember.’”
Norman Ravvin is chair of the Concordia University Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies. He is completing a novel set in contemporary Poland called The Typewriter Girl.