Through The Poet's Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky

Bozena Shallcross: Through The Poet's Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002. xix, 191 pp. Introduction. Afterword. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. $27.95, cloth.Bozena Shallcross, a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at University of Chicago, launches her study of peregrinations of three East European poets and essayists with a quotation from poet Elizabeth Bishop (a noted traveler herself): Is it lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay at home? Could Pascal have been not entirely right about just sitting quietly in one's room? (p. vii) Thus is established a crucial link between travel-whether completely voluntary or compelled by outside forces such as war, revolution, or whims of regimes-and possibility of original insight and creative vision. Leaving bourgeois herd vacationers and day trippers aside, what do poets and writers who are forced to travel, that is, forced to abandon home, perhaps forever, encounter on voyage? How do journeys nourish creative or even visionary states? How is trope of travel-and expanded optic knowledge (p. 10) which it occasions-a differentiating factor in work? Shallcross suggests that travel-defined for reader as a dynamic interaction of sight and motion which privileges the eye over other senses (p, 14)-is an experience ideally suited to phenomenological exploration. But are poets not already masters of perception, visionaries able to detect sublime in minutiae of quotidian existence? The fact that, indeed, they are, is telegraphed by another epigraph, this time from Andre Gide: Le poete est celui qui regarde. It i s precisely this intersection of normally discrete planes of private or ritualistic museum/gallery spaces, proscribed (to an East European living under communism) public urban spaces of Western cities, and notion of travel-the poet's solitary passage through time and space-that interests Shallcross.Truly at home amongst seemingly disparate conceptual frameworks and genres, from visual arts and architecture discourses to theories of exile, and from modernist lyric poetry to postmodern quasi-autobiographical essay, Shallcross delineates ideational horizon of her study with seamless authority: originality of three authors' approach to travel writing, she says, is based on their creative interpretation of journey-which they experience in an intensely visual manner-as a metaphysical journey. Their views are sustained through creative capacity to transform mundane aspects of world they observed into a sublime vision (p. xvii, my emphasis). She shows us how poet's passage through spheres of public (the cityscape) towards private (the museum) and finally sacred work of art (paintings, frescos, interiors, sculpture) produces a sense of inner tension, a state of heightened receptivity that holds exceptional potential for generating epiphanic vision.As economy of her thesis demonstrates, Shallcross has performed something akin to a surgical procedure. Hers is a close, and in places radical, reading of epiphanic writings (both poetry and prose) by Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky, texts that resulted from a confrontation with specific works of art during authors' various travels-some of which had been brought on by forced exile. Her methodobgy offers an innovative way of bridging academic disciplines, pulling literary critic away from domination of Logos and art historian away from strictly visual discourses.The book is organized into a critical introduction and seven chapters, of which two each are devoted to Adam Zagajewski and Joseph Brodsky and three to Zbigniew Herbert. For Zagajewski, Shallcross traces poet's travels to New York City and centers her discussion on his epiphanic confrontation, in Frick Collection, with Vermeer's canvas Girl Interrupted at her Music. …

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