Ma się ku wieczorowi. Wiersze niepublikowane z lat 2014-2020

It’s Getting Towards Evening: Unpublished Poems 2014–2020 by Ernest Bryll, born in 1935, the nestor of Polish poetry, features poems well-rooted in tradition – most importantly in the biblical tradition. What returns is an echo of the story about the road to Emaus, since it is getting towards evening, and the  speaker again and again cannot recognise Christ walking. What can be strongly sensed in this work is the rhythm, not melodious; its deliberate breakdowns transform the  poems into scenes for a bard or monologue performer. Bryll creates a poetry of struggle with multiple darknesses. He fights with the dark of his own memory, which keeps bringing forth illusions of old Poland – a country of a language and people long gone. These are also poems of struggle with the dark of the Venetian mirror, behind which sit dead viewers who do not understand much from the doings of those still alive. This suggestive metaphor leads Bryll to catastrophic conclusions about the modern world: the big City, choking on the forbidden Word. Hence his most recent poetry, though hiding behind rhythms at times hurdy-gurdy, bears witness to the horrific grotesque produced by contemporary people. They wrestle with the Word, “which is best left unknown,” which causes a “sore throat”: “That’s why in our city/ we constantly cough. Grunt and wheeze.” The City-Poland, similarly to the Besieged City of Zbigniew Herbert, published under the communist regime, is still under siege. The enemy does not lurk with weapons or threaten with tanks. Bryll formulates a bitter diagnosis: contemporary Europeans themselves have become a besieged city; they have shut themselves off behind the walls of self-censorship, political correctness, which sentences language and its most perfect form, poetry, to slow death. More and more often words do not refer us to objects; basic biblical signs are rendered illegible: “The star that led us has grown bald.”