There is nothing more poetically surreal than the people who enter our lives and shape our sense of self
Deep Chambers, Soft Beds
Deep chambers, soft beds.
I colour this palace full of people, water,
and nominated fabrics.
Do you know how much I cared
about marrying tiles and pleats off? So there wouldn’t be
ceramic teeth on the windows, so you could look out without biting,
without burying your claws into the armrests?
An already rocking chair is just the beginning.
It doesn’t even have runners.
It’s not even real rocking.
We’ll die of weightlessness.
Our bodies will be ritually burned
in the name of drifting over the earth.
Our ribs will fry for the food of giant children.
Giant, wayward children who know nothing of the world.
And the world will devour them when they’re old.
The earth they wanted to escape
will swallow them whole.
10 or 24
Like with the discographies of massive bands
with huge, deep hands and legs racing
hundreds of miles toward perfection, I square off with you,
you ever-enlarging sight, you swelling gourd
of sensations and wants. Like on the islands that will never
yield, because their organs are a submarine:
invisible, but flipping the order inside out,
melting everything in its path.
Girls eat cotton candy in summer, girls read
scientific treatises, boys change their clothes each month,
cars each year, girls go to expensive clubs
nearby cathedrals and government buildings, boys ride streetcars
in packs, say prego prego, not knowing in the least what it means.
They toss their laughter out every window.
It lands with the rest,
on the longest edge of a full stop.
Orchard
Oh, thick red sealant!
Daisies could swim in it
like sylphs in a lake. I went to
a fortune-teller who ripped out my eye,
and only through it did she truly see.
I stepped onto a bridge so as to
walk halfway and turn back.
I woke wild boars in the branches, and they
rolled over and jumped into the pot themselves.
The forbidden board games they once
beat me with, as if I was a seminary boy – their rules
have now changed:
they serve transformation.
Mulberry
When did the earth shut tight?
Which tree’s key opened the sky?
It must have been a birch, long before my payday.
Harmony,
that name rarely sweetened my ear,
but I heard the blankets hissed with cold last night.
A boulder full of passion, an active radiator, and a mulberry,
the most logical plant.
Thorned roses,
effective action,
and the surgent fear
that rises up from between us
and goes to wake someone else.
Translated by Ewa & Lynn Suh
There is nothing more poetically surreal than the people who enter our lives and shape our sense of self
Translation rights: Agata Puwalska, apuwalska@gmail.com
The Archer confirms Przemysław Suchanecki’s ascent as one of Poland’s most distinctive contemporary voices. Readers and critics have noted the avant-garde, surrealist quality of his works, and The Archer – Suchanecki’s fourth collection – is no exception. His poetry, however, derives its originality from a deep sincerity, an earnest engagement with people who enter his life, even briefly. Whether writing about a lover, a fortune teller, or boys riding street cars, Suchanecki grounds his poems in the relational fabric of everyday life while allowing various thingly props of reality to feature prominently alongside human figures. He writes in ‘Deep Chambers, Soft Beds’: ‘I colour this palace full of people, water, / and nominated fabrics.’ In this way, his poems become ruminations in which human and thingly dimensions blend, blurring the conventional lines of reality.
Such poems provoke in us a sense of life’s strangeness, its mysterium. They come from a poet who pays close attention to what stubbornly remains just beyond the neat categories of language, but becomes momentarily accessible through the alchemy of love or the simple act of observing others. In the poem ‘10 or 24’, laughter tossed out from a street car ‘lands […] on the longest edge of a full stop’. A fleeting moment thus becomes deeply experiential, blending laughter with a punctuation mark whose ‘longest edge’ pulls us beyond the comfort zones of language and the conventional limits of the self.
Lynn Suh
Selected samples
She climbed her first peaks in a headscarf at a time when women in the mountains were treated by climbers as an additional backpack. It was with her that female alpinism began! She gained recognition in a spectacular way. The path was considered a crossing for madmen. Especially since the tragic accident in 1929, preserved … Continue reading “Halina”
First, Marysia, a student of an exclusive private school in Warsaw’s Mokotów district, dies under the wheels of a train. Her teacher, Elżbieta, tries to find out what really happened. She starts a private investigation only soon to perish herself. But her body disappears, and the only people who have seen anything are Gniewomir, a … Continue reading “Wound”
A young girl, Regina Wieczorek, was found dead on the beach. She was nineteen years old and had no enemies. Fortunately, the culprit was quickly found. At least, that’s what the militia think. Meanwhile, one day in November, Jan Kowalski appears at the police station. He claims to have killed not only Regina but also … Continue reading “Penance”
The year is 1922. A dangerous time of breakthrough. In the Eastern Borderlands of the Republic of Poland, Bolshevik gangs sow terror, leaving behind the corpses of men and disgraced women. A ruthless secret intelligence race takes place between the Lviv-Warsaw-Free City of Gdańsk line. Lviv investigator Edward Popielski, called Łysy (“Hairless”), receives an offer … Continue reading “A Girl with Four Fingers”
This question is closely related to the next one, namely: if any goal exists, does life lead us to that goal in an orderly manner? In other words, is everything that happens to us just a set of chaotic events that, combined together, do not form a whole? To understand how the concept of providence … Continue reading “Order and Love”
The work of Józef Łobodowski (1909-1988) – a remarkable poet, prose writer, and translator, who spent most of his life in exile – is slowly being revived in Poland. Łobodowski’s brilliant three- volume novel, composed on an epic scale, concerns the fate of families and orphans unmoored by the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war and … Continue reading “Ukrainian Trilogy: Thickets, The Settlement, The Way Back”
