Without End: New and Selected Poems

The best work of one of Poland's greatest younger poets

I love to swim in the sea, which keeps
talking to itself
in the monotone of a vagabond
who no longer recalls
exactly how long he's been on the road.
Swimming is like prayer:
palms join and part,
join and part
almost without end.
--from "On Swimming"

This selection draws from Adam Zagajewski's English-language collections, both in and out of print; it also includes work from his early books, Communiqué and Butcher Shop, as well as new poems that are among Zagajewski's most refreshing and rewarding: meditations on human frailty and vigor, they are vividly imagined, of great clarity of thought and scrupulous attention to the natural world. In Clare Cavanagh's lucid, graceful translations these poems share the vocation that allows us, in Zagajewski's words, "to experience astonishment and to stop still in that astonishment for a long moment or two."