Poetry Criticism | Zagajewski, Adam - John Haines (essay date 1998)

John Haines (essay date 1998)

SOURCE: A Review of Mysticism for Beginners, in The Hudson Review, Vol. LI, No. 3, Autumn, 1998, pp. 609-11.

[In the following excerpt, Haines praises the historical consciousness, and the concentrated imagery of the poems in Mysticism for Beginners.]

…To turn from Stafford's poems to the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski² is to depart from a familiar terrain and enter another space altogether, strangely removed from our still coherent neighborhoods:

Europe is already sleeping, Night's animals,
mournful and rapacious
move in for the kill.
Soon America will be sleeping too.
"Houston, 6 p.m."

I think I would know, without being told, that these lines were not written by an American. Indeed, it is hardly possible to find in this slim book a poem in which the history of our time is not in some way acknowledged. The events, the...

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