Poetic voice with a tragic conscience

Colm Tóibín celebrates the glittering imagination of Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, who is reading in Dún Laoghaire next weekend

In Two Cities, his book of meditations on exile, history and the imagination, the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski points out that "to build a bridge one must first - small detail - come upon a river".

His own gnarled river, full of depth and irony, has come in the form of a great gift to any writer - Lvov, a lost and sacred city, dreamlike and stunning in its beauty, from which his parents were banished, and which he will never know. The aftervoice of this city, its smells and flavours, are more real than Gliwice, the ugly, industrial city to which the Zagajewskis have been expelled.

The poet loves even saying the name Lvov: "To go to Lvov. Which station / for Lvov, if not in a dream, at dawn, when dew / gleams on a suitcase, when express / trains and bullet trains are being born. To leave / in haste for Lvov, night or day, in September / or in March."

For Zagajewski, history was not something that could be lightly discarded, despite his best efforts. "My entire education as a writer," he has written, "strove to free me from the caprices and grimaces of History."

History, however, had pursued him. Lvov, the lost paradise, where he would visit one day and feel a stranger, became part of the Soviet Union in 1945, just as Gliwice, once a German-speaking city, became Polish. All of this happened because of the deliberations of three old men at Yalta at the end of the second World War, the year Zagajewski was born. Also, he grew up not only in a climate of loss, but in a world where utterance itself was closely watched and guarded, and where poetry, in all its purity and secret signs, mattered almost as much as prayer.

Zagajewski writes with stunned wonder about his discovery of the city of Krakow where he went to study, a city, he noted in a poem, where: "Of the most recent architecture / the Palace of Police stands out."

This interests him as much as the "Kings in marble / tombs, tombs in crypts, God / in prayers, fingers in rings." In considering Poland and its fate, Zagajewski has also been acutely alert to the fate of the Jews in Europe in the years before his birth. His walking the streets of the haunted and repressed old city was an early aspect of his yearning for Europe, which he would share with other Polish poets such as Czeslaw Milotz and Zbigniew Herbert.

He writes in his book of essays Solidarity, Solitude about "an admiration for the cathedrals of Europe, for Vermeer, Shakespeare" that he believes was felt most keenly and most intensely in countries such as Poland, where "the former character of Europe also appears . . . not as a ghost but as a model, an ideal, a tale of chivalry".

He ends his poem Dutch Painters: "Doors were wide open, the wind was friendly. / Brooms rested after work well done. / Homes bared all. The painting of a land / without secret police. / Only on the young Rembrandt's face / An early shadow fell. Why? / Tell us, Dutch painters, what will happen / When the apple is peeled, when the silk dims, / when all the colours grow cold. / Tell us what darkness is."

With a sensibility damaged by history, a political conscience deformed by totalitarianism, a mind deeply affected by his study of philosophy, it would be easy to imagine Zagajewski writing veiled protest poetry (which he did in his youth) or poems entirely private and runic, bitter in tone and indecipherable in content, or even descending into shrill silence.

He has instead been rescued by a fundamental belief in poetry itself, its autonomous and beautiful power in conflict always with its mundane roots in the visible and quotidian universe, "the whole coarse existence of the world", as he puts it.

He has been rescued also by the great pull in his work between a tragic conscience and a voice always on the verge of bursting with comic pleasure. He has been greatly assisted by his love of phrases and his talent for making them, and by a well-stocked mind and, most of the time, a glittering imagination.

IN 1982, AS public life in Poland became fascinating, Zagajewski went into exile in Paris and later began to teach at Houston in Texas. (He now also spends part of the year in Krakow.) "I lost two homelands," he wrote, "but I sought a third: a space for the imagination."

His Song of an Emigre ends: "At the Orthodox / church in Paris, the last White / grey-haired Russians pray to God, who / is centuries younger than they and equally / helpless. In alien cities we'll / remain, like trees, like stones."

In Zagajewski's best poems, he has succeeded in making the space of the imagination connect with experience - things seen and heard and remembered in all their limits and sorrow and relished joy have the same power for him as things conjured. He has written: "The imagination itself may rank among its own enemies - if it loses its sense of measure, if it loses sight of the solid world that cannot be dissolved in art."

One of his best recent poems is called Try to Praise the Mutilated World: "You've seen the refugees going nowhere, / you've heard the executioners sing joyfully. / You should praise the mutilated world. / Remember the moments when we were together / In a white room and the curtain fluttered. / Return in thought to the concert where music flared."

Toward the end of Tremor: Selected Poems, published in 1985, there is a poem that has been omitted from the more ample Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002). Called July 6, 1980, it is Zagajewski's most obviously political poem, dealing with a dream apocalyptic uprising in Poland.

The tone is ludic and somewhat crude, but contains some astonishing lines toward the end, as he lists some further events which occur on that date: "A retired / bank employee presents on television / tapes with the recorded voices / of the dead. The dead don't have much / to say, they tell their names, / weep, or greet us with birdlike / screeches, short as sighing."

THESE LINES, RATHER than the more pressingly political lines around them, are quintessential Zagajewski, insisting on mixing the deeply playful with the highly grave, finding phrases such as "the dead don't have much to say", which even in translation remains oddly affecting in its calm mystery, wry acceptance and slow, sly shrug. The poet's parliament, the poet has written, "houses both the living and the dead".

In Another Beauty, his most recent books of essays, Zagajewski realises that "some poems and pictures will live on", and this for him is essential, but then he asks: "But who will revive the moments and hours?"

Later in the book, he points out that "art springs from the most profound admiration for the world, both seen and unseen". His work is haunted by the lost detail of things, which it is part of his sacred duty to list, which he does with relish, because he loves language, and with restraint and something close to regret also, because he distrusts language just as much.

In the seriousness of his calling and the beauty of his tone and phrasing, and his concern with the legacy of art and the ambiguous history of the dead, Zagajewski has always been a member of a secret European union, which has remained as powerful and as useful, in certain and uncertain ways, as any set of economic and territorial unions.

The Master by Colm Tóibín is published by Picador. Selected Poems, by Adam Zagajewski, is published by Faber. Zagajewski reads with Bill Manhire and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill at the Pavilion Theatre next Friday (Mar 24) at 8:30pm