SOURCE: A Review of Canvas, in Partisan Review, Vol. 61, No. 4, Fall, 1994, pp. 704-8.

In the following review, Simic suggests that Zagajewski explores the philosophical and imaginative homelessness of modern men and women.

… When Adam Zagajewski's selected poems were first published in English in 1985, it was clear that he was a major poet. Tremor was a book that reminded one of other great contemporary Polish poets, Milosz, Herbert and Szymborska, especially in its preoccupation with history and its love of irony. It was equally clear, however, that Zagajewski is an original voice. This new, well-translated collection confirms it. His subject, if one could generalize about a poet so intellectually complex, is the epoch's end. Not solely the end of a long and murderous century, but the death of ideas that underwrote all our now failed Utopian projects:

Philosophically and imaginatively we are once more homeless. We are once more...