Afternoon Viewing: Adam Zagajewski
From the YouTube description:
Poet, novelist, essayist Adam Zagajewski (born 1945) is considered one of the Generation of 68 or New Wave writers in Poland; his early work was protest poetry, though he has moved away from that emphasis in his later work. The reviewer Joachim T. Baer noted in World Literature Today that Zagajewskis themes are the night, dreams, history and time, infinity and eternity, silence and death. Writing of Zagajewskis 1991 collection of poems, Canvas, poet and reviewer Robert Pinsky commented that the poems are about the presence of the past in ordinary life: history not as chronicle of the dead, or an anima to be illuminated by some doctrine, but as an immense, sometimes subtle force inhering in what people see and feel every day—and in the ways we see and feel. Nothing could take the reader in a direction more contrary to todays cult of the excitements of self than to follow Zagajewski as he unspools his seductive praise of serenity, sympathy, forbearance; of the calm and courage of an ordinary life, wrote Susan Sontag.
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