From Publishers Weekly
The 14 essays that make up poet Zagajewski’s "defense" are an engagingly warm and witty blend of literary comment and memoir, passionate about aesthetic matters but refreshingly free of personal rancor. Zagajewski was born in Poland at the end of WWII; his career is inexorably bound up with the fate of his homeland, and his essays are full of the critical but fierce patriotism common to the country often wryly called "God’s playground." Zagajewski’s combination of the personal, literary and political is canny and well judged, as in the excellent "Nietzsche in Krakow," which begins as partly nostalgic reminiscence, tracing the author’s furtive discovery, as an adolescent living under communism, of the officially proscribed "mustachioed philosopher" and his delight in "the scorn with which this philologist and philosopher treated the state." But this remembrance of youthful enthusiasm underlies a more skeptical view, in which Nietzsche’s disdain for objective truth and worship of irrationality are seen to underlie not only fascism but, through Lenin, the state socialism of postwar Poland. Though the essays are written in a casually intimate style, such names as Mann and Musil are invoked without undue strain. In other essays, the careers of such friends and luminaries as Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert are contextualized with both intelligence and affection, as are cities in which Zagajewski has lived, written and taught.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Renowned Polish poet Zagajewski is also a mettlesome essayist, noting wryly in his fourth impressive collection that so many poets feel the need to write in "defense of poetry," such works have become "a separate literary genre," one he can't help but contribute to. But he takes an unusually vivifying approach by celebrating ardor, an unabashed appreciation for beauty that is much maligned in our time of knee-jerk irony, worship of perversity, and literary tepidness. This leads to a rewarding exegesis of Plato's concept of metaxu, our being "in between" the tangible earth and transcendence, and a discerning discussion of how poetry provides a crucial link between the quotidian and the ecstatic. Zagajewski develops this thesis further in the equally powerful "The Shabby and the Sublime," and in supple readings of his mentors Czelaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert. Peppery and cosmopolitan, Zagajewski also recounts various journeys, considers fascism's impact on literature, rails against "small poetry," and defends humor as an essential poetic element. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Seldom has the muse of poetry spoken to anyone with such clarity as in Zagajewski's case." -Joseph Brodsky

"His mixture of skepticism and passion . . . makes him one of the most interesting poets of his generation writing in any language." -Jaroslaw Anders, Los Angeles Times Book Review


Book Description
Ardor, inspiration, the soul, the sublime: Such terms have long since fallen from favor among critics and artists alike. In his new collection of essays, Adam Zagajewski continues his efforts to reclaim for art not just the terms but the scanted spiritual dimension of modern human existence that they stake out.

Bringing gravity and grace to his meditations on art, society, and history, Zagajewski wears his erudition lightly, with a disarming blend of modesty and humor. His topics range from autobiography (his first visit to a post-Soviet Lvov after childhood exile; his illicit readings of Nietzsche in Communist Poland); to considerations of artist friends past and present (Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz); to intellectual and psychological portraits of cities he has known, east and west; to a dazzling thumbnail sketch of postwar Polish poetry.

Zagajewski gives an account of the place of art in the modern age that distinguishes his self-proclaimed liberal vision from the “right-wing radicalism” of such modernist precursors as Eliot or Yeats. The same mixture of ardor and compassion that marks Zagajewski’s distinctive contribution to modern poetry runs throughout this eloquent, engaging collection.


About the Author
Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov, Poland, in 1945. He lives in Krakow and spends part of the year teaching at the University of Houston. He was awarded the 2004 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Ardor, inspiration, the soul, the sublime : such terms have long since fallen from favor among critics and artists alike. In his new collection of essays, Adam Zagajewski continues his efforts to reclaim for art not just the terms but the scanted spiritual dimension of modern human existence that they describe." Zagajewski's topics range from autobiography (his first visit to post-Soviet Lvov after childhood exile; his illicit readings of Nietzsche in Communist Poland); to considerations of artist friends past and present (Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz); to intellectual and psychological portraits of cities he has known, east and west; to a thumbnail sketch of postwar Polish poetry.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal