Poza zasięgiem

This might be Mirka Szychowiak’s saddest poetry collection, but one in which – paradoxically – despair brings hope. The poet, against all odds, believes in the human being and their ability to defy evil. Dark poems are intertwined with light ones and the painful account balance of these reckonings is, I think, positive. From a painful memory one fishes out the fragments that strengthen the feeling of sense, that make the reader more sensitive and set the voice – in effect they make up the human being that the poet describes, the one she – that’s her moral claim – wants to see. In the end, these fragments prevail, though they are also balanced with images of human weakness, narrow-mindedness and cruelty. The protagonist is worried that those images increase in number, that they unceremoniously take over the memory and due to that “there is less and less space for beauty and less strength for vendetta”. This book is focused on memory and its work, it answers basic questions: why do we obsessively remember one particular thing (and here another anecdote pops up, another snippet of a story) and not something else, and why that “something else” is often out of reach. Szychowiak is a master of poetic narration which brings an important, formative life event to the fore. And not just from one’s own life, but first and foremost from other people’s lives, often these are excluded, dismissed, defeated people. Not to compassionately lament or pity them, but to give them a voice, show them from a better perspective, remember what they used to be like before they went down, fell by the wayside, stopped counting in the game. Her poems’ seductive power is unclear. They probably lead us to the source of human communality, to some species-specific empathy and high sensitivity. That’s the reason for the extraordinary feeling one has after reading this book – it cleanses, forces one to stop, to temporarily smother the tendency to be petty, mean and ill-willed towards others.