Garadobedaro

Mateusz Żaboklicki’s Garadobedaro is a complex, formally stunning, and genuinely moving book-length poem whose starting point – which is not to say, its actual or only subject – is the death of a father. On a certain superficial level, the book is an attempt at an impossible task, which is the taming of this traumatic experience – not even so much through the narrative itself, but by framing the memories in a poetic form; a kind of reining in of memories through the shape of a concrete poem. 

Ultimately, however, Żaboklicki is not that interested in poetry as a possible working through of trauma – a popular and played-out trope. Instead, he offers a more profound reflection on memory and its evasions, on what one actually remembers when one does not want to remember what one remembers in reality. The poet is a vigilant and exceptionally perceptive observer of all the narrative devices we consciously and unconsciously employ when actively tapping into our memories. Even Garadobedaro’s brilliant humour contributes to this overarching theme: jokes appear here as a means of hiding or covering up the actual contents of the narrative, and as such are invariably tainted with a kind of horror that is difficult to exactly pin down. Żaboklicki’s poems remain moving not in spite of their wittiness, but precisely because of it. 

The book’s conceptual ingenuity and formal precision both stand out; Żaboklicki works mostly with a lengthy, monologue-like form, but weaves into it bits and pieces organised according to specific genres and conversions (the sestina, the pantoum), all the time experimenting with the metre. There is a veritable plethora of intriguing ideas here – and all of them, in a very intentional way, come together to form a single meaningful and moving totality