Little Abysses: Adam Zagajewski’s “Evening, Stary Sącz”

Abstract

This essay considers Adam Zagajewski’s poem “Evening, Stary Sącz”and in particular, the line “Little abysses open between the stones.”This image invites us to reflect on the many startling gaps and voids in Zagajewski’s poems. At times, those abysses suggest historical and political dimensions particular to Polish (and European) experience in the 20th century; but more often, Zagajewski presents the abyss as moral and metaphysical. “Evening, Stary Sącz,”a poem that doesn’t on its surface appear very threatening, opens suddenly through its “little abysses”into sacrificial reality.