Asymmetry
Poems
ISBN10: 0374538735
ISBN13: 9780374538736
Trade Paperback
96 Pages
$14.00
CA$19.00
One of the most vibrant voices of our time, Adam Zagajewski is a modern master of the poetic form. In Asymmetry, his first collection of poems in five years, he revisits the themes that have long concerned him: the enduring imprint of history, the beauty of nature, the place of the exile. Though as sanguine as ever, Zagajewski often turns to elegy in this deeply powerful collection, remembering loved ones he’s lost: a hairdresser, the philosopher Krzystzof Michalski, and, most poignantly, his parents. A moving reflection on family, the sublimity of everyday life, death, and happiness, Asymmetry is a magnificent distillation of an astounding poetic voice.
Reviews
Praise for Asymmetry
"Zagajewski's poems pull us from whatever routine threatens to dull our sense, from whatever might lull us into mere existence."—Philip Boehm, The New York Times Book Review
"Zagajewski's poems are visually rich [and] startlingly fresh . . . Poetry and thinking for Zagajewski have to do with learning how to see clearly. His poems celebrate those rare moments when we catch a glimpse of a world from which all labels have been unpeeled . . . Indispensable."—Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books
"[Zagajewski's] poems enter and possess you quietly. It is the quiet of a train halted on its line. The engine throbs like a pulse, and there is always music in these verses, or the echo of music . . . His is the quiet voice at the corner of immense devastation of an obscene century, more intimate than Auden, yet as cosmopolitan as Milosz, Celan, or Brodsky."—Derek Walcott, The New Republic