Without End: New and Selected Poems

About this book

The best work of one of Polands greatest younger poets I love to swim in the sea which keeps talking to itself in the monotone of a vagabond who no longer recalls exactly how long hes been on the road. Swimming is like prayer: palms join and part join and part almost without end. --from "On Swimming" This selection draws from Adam Zagajewskis English-language collections both in and out of print; it also includes work from his early books Communiqu and Butcher Shop as well as new poems that are among Zagajewskis most refreshing and rewarding: meditations on human frailty and vigor they are vividly imagined of great clarity of thought and scrupulous attention to the natural world. In Clare Cavanaghs lucid graceful translations these poems share the vocation that allows us in Zagajewskis words "to experience astonishment and to stop still in that astonishment for a long moment or two."