SOURCE: A Review of Canvas, in World Literature Today, Vol. 66, No. 4, Autumn, 1992, pp. 746-47.

In the following review of Canvas, Baer calls Zagajewski's metaphorical imagery "extraordinary" and suggests that he often writes his poetry as if in conversation with other poets and thinkers.

In his wonderful book of essays Poetry and Experience (1961) Archibald MacLeish quotes Yeats's lines on the "ultimate meaning of which poetry is capable": "What is the meaning of all song?" Yeats proceeded to answer the question himself: "Let all things pass away." It is this stance, this position toward the world, which projects from the slim collection of Adam Zagajewski's poetry titled Canvas, sensitively translated from the Polish originals, which had been published in a variety of Polish émigré publications.

One could use various epithets to describe Zagajewski's verse: reflective, metaphysical, atmospheric, impressionistic, pictorially vivid. Some of the longer poems are phrased as interrogative sentences...