Adam Zagajewski is an internationally acclaimed poet who was born in Poland, immigrated to France, and now teaches in Houston, Texas. Though he writes in Polish, several of his poetry collections have been translated into English, including Tremor (1985), Canvas (1991), and Mysticism for Beginners (1997). Zagajewski has been awarded the Berliner Kunstlerprogramm fellowship, the Kurt Tucholsky Prize, a Prix de la Liberte, and a Guggenheim fellowship. His essays have been collected in Two Cities (1995) and Solidarity, Solitude (1990). Zagajewski is, wrote Adam Kirsch in the New Republic, "the preeminent Polish poet of his generation." According to Jaroslaw Anders in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, he is "one of the most interesting poets of his generation writing in any language."

As David Lehman noted in Newsweek in his review of Tremor, Zagajewski's poetry "oscillates between praise . . . and pain that stubbornly resists being transformed into beauty." Lehman singled out the following three lines to illustrate his point: "God / is the smallest poppy seed in the world, / bursting with greatness." As in these lines, Zagajewski often shifts in his poems from the physical object to a moment of abstraction. "Such a quest for transcendence is essentially romantic in its impulse, but Mr. Zagajewski," stated Eva Hoffman in the New York Times Book Review, "is a modern romantic, in whom an attraction to quietude and to interstitial, hidden spaces often coexists with mosaics of contemporary urban detail, a taste for incongruity and a sometimes ironic reflectiveness." Another reviewer of Tremor, Stanislaw Baranczak in the New Republic, pointed out that Zagajewski's poems are not the "typically dissident" poetry one might expect from a Polish poet who long resisted the communist government of his homeland. Zagajewski's poetry, Baranczak explained, "has something important to say about life, death, love, loneliness, and other rather universal matters."

Zagajewski's Canvas (1991) has been described by poet Robert Pinsky in the New Republic as being "about the presence of the past in ordinary life: history not as chronicle of the dead, or an anima to be illuminated by some doctrine, but as an immense, sometimes subtle force inhering in what people see and feel every day—and in the ways we see and feel." "Zagajewski's themes," noted Joachim T. Baer in World Literature Today, "are the night, dreams, history and time, infinity and eternity, silence and death." Pinsky found that in Zagajewski's work, "the engulfing, ferocious historical reality appears as our habitat. . . . And the perception of that habitat has a mysterious, elating power."

In Mysticism for Beginners, Zagajewski presents poems which "meander gently toward moments of enlightenment," as John Taylor noted in Poetry. Anders explained that in this collection, Zagajewski sought to find whether serious contemporary poetry can "survive without mystery and ecstasy; can it be sustained by irony alone"? This question reveals the poet to be "a very modern mystic," according to Anders, "one who realizes that the mystical pursuit is essentially a contradictory one." "This collection," wrote the reviewer for Publishers Weekly, "reconfirms the international status of a vigorous, ever-questioning voice."

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