“Try to praise the mutilated world”: Adam Zagajewski and the poetry of 9/11

Adam Zagajewski’s poem addresses history’s victims only obliquely, through its refugees and abandoned homesteads. Lyric history, as Zagajewski envisions it, retains its humanity through its specificity and thus remains habitable and human in spite of the endless exiles and executioners. As throughout Zagajewski’s writing, the natural world is steeped in human history, and though he makes no explicit mention of it, this history is clearly informed by modern Polish experience. The poem emerges from experience that is both deeply personal and profoundly historical. “Try to praise the mutilated world, " the poet bids himself as the poem begins; and forms of this exhortation recur four times in the space of the poem’s twenty-one lines. The compassion for all “refugees headed nowhere” that gives Zagajewski’s poem resonance far beyond the borders of his lost homeland.