True Life: Poems

By Adam Zagajewski and Clare Cavanagh

A stunning, intimate collection by the late great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski.

. . . I think I sought wisdom

(without resignation) in poems
and also a certain calm madness.
I found, much later, a moment’s joy
and melancholy’s dark contentment.

In True Life, the Polish writer Adam Zagajewski, one of the world’s most admired and beloved poets, turns his gaze to the past with piercing clarity and a tone of wry, lyrical melancholy. He captures the rhythms of a city street on the page and the steady beat of the passage of time against it (“Roads cannot be destroyed // Even if peonies cover them / smelling like eternity”) and writes of the endless struggle between stasis and change, between movement and stillness (“We knew / it would be the same / as always // It would all go back to normal”).

Mary Oliver called Zagajewski “the most pertinent, impressive, meaningful poet of our time,” and Philip Boehm wrote in The New York Times Book Review that his poems “pull us from whatever routine threatens to dull our senses, from whatever might lull us into mere existence.” True Life, first published in Polish in 2019 and translated with genius by Clare Cavanagh, reveals the astonishing, immortal depths of Zagajewski’s insight and artistry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Feb 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9780374601577

Adam Zagajewski

Adam Zagajewski (1945–2021) was born in Lvov, Poland. His books include Tremor; Canvas; Mysticism for Beginners; Without End; Eternal Enemies; Unseen Hand; Asymmetry; Solidarity, Solitude; Two Cities; Another Beauty; A Defense of Ardor; and Slight Exaggeration—all published by FSG. He lived in Chicago and Kraków.

Book preview

The Twentieth Century in Retirement

Let’s try to imagine it:

a little like old Tolstoy

he strolls the fields of Picardy,

where funny tanks once

clumsily defeated

the terrain’s slight elevation.

He visits the town

where Bruno Schulz died

or sits on a riverbank

above the Vistula’s dim water,

a meadow scented with warm

dandelions, burdocks, and memory.

He doesn’t speak, rarely smiles.

Doctors warn him

to avoid emotion.

He says: I’ve learned one thing

There is only mercy—

for people, animals, trees, and paintings.

Only mercy—

always too late.

Drottningholm

A photograph from years ago—my parents

outside Drottningholm Palace

near Stockholm.

It’s probably September,

month of partings and rapture.

My father in his tie,

my mother’s