SOURCE: "Adam Zagajewski," in his The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetry, William Morrow and Company, 1989, pp. 423-31.

In the following essay, Birkerts argues that rather than writing poetry determined by history, Txigajewski has developed a metaphysical imagery that expresses "our common exile from a comprehensible reality. "

A recent review of Adam Zagajewski's Tremor (Renata Gorczynski, translator) by his fellow Polish émigré, the poet Stanislaw Baranczak, points up to me just how much historical context conditions the interpretive act. Baranczak, as a member of Zagajewski's poetic gen eration—the so-called generation of 1968—and who surely knows the poems in their original cadences, writes as follows:

…the multidimensional meaning of Zagajewski's poetry can by no means be reduced to that of "a poetry of protest" or a generational manifesto. The book can (and should) be read also outside the framework of Poland's recent history, and it will not lose...