As I mentioned in an earlier post, during the days leading up to the publication of Blueshift Road, I’m highlighting other poets’ poems that I feel particularly close to, whether I first read them forty years ago or yesterday. I think of these offerings as an exercise in gratitude.
Scanning my bookshelves today, I reached for Tremor: Selected Poems by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski. I was recalling “Fire,” a poem that has echoed in my mind for many years as an astute portrait of noxious nationalism.
I found Tremor at the Houston bookstore that I mentioned in yesterday’s post—not surprising, as Zagajewski taught for a time at the University of Houston.
Sadly, Zagajewski passed away in March 2021 in Krakow, Poland, at the age of 75.
—poem translated by Renata Gorczynski
Rogue Embryo 