Unsichtbare Hand

After years of self-chosen exile in Paris, Adam Zagajewski has returned to Poland, to his old homeland Krakow, the "city of sweet cakes,/ bitter chocolate and beautiful funerals". Nevertheless, "the restlessness that drives the wanderer" has remained with him. In his poems, Zagajewski is always on the move: whether he observes the flight of the swifts or his old father who has lost his memory, whether he speaks of nature or spirituality, of enthusiasm or melancholy. "The poets build a house for us - but they themselves/can't live in it", he writes at the end of this personal selection of his best poems from the last ten years.