TO JAK I NIC RIP

What would the world look like if linguistic relativity – the often problematic notion that our experience is moulded and delimited by the words, rules and patterns available to us in language – applied not only to our everyday communication, but to the formal preoccupations of the lyric poet? What if poetry were construed not as the artful reshaping of language, but as a native language unto itself, so that the verbal economy, formal repetitions, broken lines and aural echoes that are the stuff of lyric were also how one experienced a meeting with friends, a stroll down the street or memories of dead relatives?

Piotr Janicki’s extraordinary seventh collection,OTIC KANJI RIP, offers us a glimpse of just such an existence. This expansive, gorgeously conceived book takes us on a long walk through the poet’s experience of familiar relationships and spaces, where the experience itself is hemmed in by poetic form. Words, along with the images and emotions they might otherwise express, break where the line demands. Ellipses mark silences imposed not by ignorance or fear, but by strict adherence to word counts. The result is a mesmerising, consistently moving tour of one man’s everyday life simultaneously celebrated and mourned within and against the language available to him – limited and ephemeral, mundane yet mysterious, casual while wonderfully suggestive. As much as we might wish that we are universes unto ourselves, Janicki suggests that we are only ever successive combinations of the material available to us. Even the book’s title is an anagram of the poet’s own name. But, as Janicki convincingly demonstrates, there’s a whole lot you can do with that.