Łucznik

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.