logical places for him to confront his personal past as well as the past of his nation. Similarly, the cities of Sicily, with their rich legacy of Greece lying alongside their modern stones, invite the poet to examine the relationship between past and present. Zagajewski, however, is often more concerned with art and artists than with the simple artifacts of history. For some poems, artists are the subject matter; for others they appear as allusions. Many will be familiar to English readers of poetry. “Brodsky,” for example, offers a brief biography of Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet, who, exiled in the United States, became the U.S. poet laureate in 1991. It must surely please Zagajewski to know that Brodsky taught himself Polish in order to translate his favorite poet, the Pole Czesaw Miosz. Zagajewski offers a sketch of Brodsky’s life but is most interested in his “Favorite topic: time/ versus thought . . . .” Zagajewski reminds the reader that “irony and pain” characterize Brodsky’s voice and concludes by noting a modest tenderness that offsets Brodsky’s perfections. Still other poems deal with the late eighteenth century English poet William Blake and with Karl Marx, the nineteenth century political philosopher of communism, and his life in London.

Other of Zagajewski’s subjects, such as Polish futurist writer Aleksander Wat or avant-garde writer-director Tadeusz Kantor, will be more familiar to readers with some knowledge of Polish literary history. The ease with which the Internet identifies the unfamiliar (and sometimes reminds the researcher of American parochialism) means that such names offer no real stumbling block to the poems. In any case, Zagajewski makes the significance of the artists clear enough. In “The Power Cinema,” a poem dedicated to Polish actor Wojciech Pszoniak, Zagajewski recalls the seductive charm of films in his youth. In “Tadeusz Kantor,” he pictures Kantor in Krakow, where the writer-director was connected with the Academy of Fine Arts, and recalls how as a young man he dismissed the senior artist as irrelevant and flawed. Later, when he saw Kantor’s much-praised play Umara klasa (pr. 1975; The Dead Class, 1979), he recognized the man’s genius. As an adult, “I saw how time/ works on us . . . .” and understood Kantor’s achievement in the play’s themes concerning life’s mysteries: “what wars are, seen or unseen, just or not,/ what it means to be a Jew, a German, or/ a Pole, or maybe just human . . . . ”

It should be no surprise that Zagajewski addresses the poetry of Miosz, one of the best known of contemporary Polish poets. Here his topic is the achievement of Miosz’s work and the significance of poetry itself. Zagajewski praises the great sweep of Miosz’s poetic stances: “poems written by a rich man, knowing all,/ and by a beggar, homeless,/ an emigrant, alone. . . .” Miosz’s work can momentarily show that life is “rounder,/ fuller, prouder, unashamed . . . .” That poetry is an art that can lift the reader out of the limits of self is one of this volume’s central themes, joining many of its disparate locations and human subjects. In “Our World,” dedicated to the contemporary German novelist W. C. Sebald, for instance, Zagajewski considers the voice of a writer he never knew and the power of the dead man’s art to evoke his particular vision of the world. In “Poetry Searches for Radiance,” the poem’s title encapsulates his premise: “ . . . poetry is the kingly road/ that leads us farthest.” Significantly, the middle stanza of the poem describes a moment when a waiter in a Chinese restaurant mysteriously begins to weep. Poetry’s search for kingly radiance is not limited to life’s grandest moments but defines brief glimpses into worlds difficult to understand. This is the power that gives the reader access to Erinna of Telos, who died at the age of nineteen somewhere around 350 b.c.e, leaving only a few hexameters as well as to the ancient people who painted on cave walls and to painters from every era and to the old manevidently Zagajewski’s fatherwho sits in an apartment in the charmless city of Gliwice, recalling the past in both its beauties (kisses, gooseberries) and its horrors (the bombs of World War II, the political terrors of 1968). That past is not lost, because it is fixed in art.

The last poem in the volume is the longest, “Antennas in the Rain.” It is composed of seven pages of one- and two-line stanzas, not necessarily closely related. Many of them draw their images from poems earlier in the volume. One references an earlier poem about the liturgy of the Orthodox church. Plato reappears, and dolphins and a number of painters claim images. Vermeer appears, for example, represented by his picture of a woman who knits in front of a dark doorway. Many of the stanzas carry the vividness and allusiveness of haiku: “May evening: antennas in the rain.” That seems to be the intention of these lines, to catch threads of image and ideas much as an antenna might. One line mocks the academic fondness for categories; the professor counts six types of longing (while the poet hints that there may be many more). One line describes the sign that identifies an air-conditioned bus and also notes its destinationa day trip to Auschwitz. One offers a fragment of an American country-western song, a few present brief pictures of Krakow and Lvov. Some lines are bits of conversation; some seem mockingly addressed to the poet: “Oh, so you’re the specialist in high style?” In the Washington, D.C., Holocaust museum, the poet recognizes “my childhood, my wagons, my rust.” A salesgirl tells the speaker that she comes from Vietnamese boat people. A few lines later he notes that boat people are “the only nation free of nationalism.” His father is quoted again, saying that he spends all of his days remembering. One line is a note to himself: “Pay the phone and gas, return the books, write Claire.”

The effect of this montage is to summarize much of what Zagajewski has said throughout this volume. The artist must speak “from within the moments” that the antennas capture. The artist puts the reader in touch with the ordinary objects that create the texture of life. If poetry is “joy hiding despair,” under that despair it offers “more joy,” which evidently rises from the world the writer forces readers to see anew. From this the reader may understand the poem’s last four contradictory injunctions. “Speak from within” has long been a theme of art. “It is not about poetry” implies that, despite Zagajewski’s many poems in which the topic has appeared to be poetry, the real subject is how to be alive. “Don’t speak, listen” calls the artist to give attention to the world he lives in. The last“Don’t listen”suggests that at some point the heart can do the work.