Poltergeist

To look on through the eyes of one’s dead friend, to see her often among the living and to continually hear her voice – this, in short, is the content of the newest volume of poetry by Urszula Honek, entitled Poltergeist. It would not be much of an exaggeration to classify it as a collection of laments. These poems support the illusion of the continued existence of the absent girl. They do not allow her to pass on, reanimating a life that has already passed away, inscribing the silhouette of the dead woman in the “here and now”. “I want to think of her as living” is transformed into “I’ll write of her as if she were alive”. This particular hyper-sensitivity opens the consciousness to what occurs in the crevasse between life and death, spreading wider this basic, ontological frontier. Sometimes it disappears, and shadowy forms circulate between the worlds, which interpenetrate one another. The narrator observes her sleeping husband, trying to ascertain what side of the border he’s on. Fortunately, he’s still alive. But a shadow of uncertainty falls upon everything. It is this that determines the unusual, metaphysical atmosphere of the poems, which is impregnated by considerations on how the world has changed following the passing of her friend. Something obvious and foreseeable was transformed into a great unknown, a mystery, the wobbly being of which had to be firmed up again. The phrase “since she’s been gone” is repeated again and again, and divides life into two stages. In the first, ghosts were only found in horror films, while in the second, they penetrate reality, become visible, can be found at the reach of one’s hand, and “lights are burning in the house, though no hand has turned them on”. The book ends in prose pieces which deepen the mood of otherworldliness. Their composition allows for a crossing over into a brighter side, a completion of mourning, a farewell to the dead.