SOURCE: "Alone but Not Lonely," in The New Republic, Vol. 194, No. 1-2, January 6 & 13, 1986, pp. 39-41.

In the following review of Tremor: Selected Poems, Baranczak argues that Zagajewski's use of irony raises his work beyond protest poetry.

The first of many things that make Adam Zagajewski's poetry worthy of note is the author's birthdate: 1945. Thus far, America's acquaintance with the most recent Polish poetry (if we take only book-length selections of specific authors into account) has been limited to a few aging giants, now in their 60s or 70s, such as Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Rozewicz, or Wislawa Szymborska. Tremor is the first book of poems issued by a major American publisher that presents one of the "children of People's Poland," the generation whose birthdates coincide with the establishment of the Communist order and whose youth was spent rebelling against it.

Of course, the multidimensional meaning of Zagajewski's...