Unsichtbare Hand

After years of self-imposed exile in Paris, Adam Zagajewski has returned to Poland, to his old home of Krakow, "the city of sweet cakes, bitter chocolate, and beautiful funerals." Nevertheless, he has retained "the restlessness that drives the wanderer." In his poems, Zagajewski is always on the move: whether he is observing the flight of swifts or his elderly father, who has lost his memory, whether he speaks of nature or the spiritual, of enthusiasm or melancholy. "The poets build a house for us - yet they themselves cannot live in it," he writes at the end of this personal selection of his best poems from the last ten years.