Po domu

The speaker of Dariusz Sośnicki’s new poems (published after seven years of silence) wants to be part of a community, wants to be among people, wishes for them not only to be guests in the rooms of his poems. In the manifesto poem “If a Builder”, which opens After the House, the reader is turned into the building’s resident. From now on we are of this construction, we are co-responsible for the shared space: of the world, society, state. Sośnicki’s previous collection-houses, poem-houses, which have by now become the suggestive and idiomatic feature of his poetry, existed as phantoms, were unobvious, and the speaker in these earlier works was a more distanced host, rather than the builder of After the House. There has been a change in Sośnicki. The new “house” of his poetry, though still the intellectual’s safe haven, is also a house which co-exists with other houses. The guest of the poem – the reader – is the equally legitimate resident, a neighbour from above, behind the wall, someone who shares with the author the common space and together with him is responsible for the meaning of the poems. Certainly, we can talk about many layers of this work, but the most significant are: philosophical, religious (connected with the biblical style) and stricte autothematic, creative, bound to the most important metaphor of construction – building the world and its understanding; building an artwork. The inner play with the meaning of “after the house” reveals a dimension which happens beyond the house, also outside. It is connected with the most significant task the author outlines for himself: a broadly understood affirmation of life, an admiration of the world. The allusion to a phrase by another poet, Andrzej Sosnowski, about the poem leaving the house becomes the foundation of this rhetorical reversal of meaning. The poem which concludes After the House asks if the poem itself is both the world and the house we are responsible for.