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Book World: Words of wisdom or wishful thinking? The problem with new books that aim to heal us.
Mark Athitakis, The Washington Post
April 14, 2021
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Edited by James Crews
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The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, who died March 21, wasn t a household name. But there s a decent chance you know one of his poems. And if you lived through 2020, you have a bone-deep understanding of the mood it evoked.
In Try to Praise the Mutilated World, Zagajewski summoned the urge to sound a note of positivity amid death and chaos: you ve seen the refugees going nowhere, / you ve heard the executioners sing joyfully. / You should praise the mutilated world. The bittersweet poem circulated widely after 9/11. The New Yorker printed it on the back page of its first issue after the attacks, where it sat, alone, somber as a tombstone but surrounded by enough white space to feel something like hope.
Poems of Healing for These Troubled Times bu.edu - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bu.edu Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A Note from the Poetry Editor
Poets must speak of their time, Czeslaw Milosz often told his students. And so they, in very different ways, do. Karim Fawzi, in a poem dated June 9th, 2003, speaks of berries and Baghdad, and of beating his present existence with the cane of departure, while Valzhyna Mort tells us about the fate of her generation in post-Soviet (but still totalitarian) Belarus.
As you will browse through the pages of this special all poetry issue of
Words Without Borders you will discover many images, details, the tiniest moments tied together by emotion, wonder, rhythm. Thus, Gloria Fuertes s vigor, Daniil Kharms s theatrics of marvel, and Goran Sonnevi s passion for the smallest of details, for The visions of birds / she and B had together, that attentiveness. Why such attentiveness in poetry? Why images-so many of them, reoccurring in poem after poem, line after line? Attentiveness, Paul Celan teaches us, is the natural prayer of the soul. As for images, th