Żal, może on

Żal, może on [Grief, Maybe It] is the tenth collection of poetry by Roman Honet. This poet of peculiar, idiosyncratic imagination tends to set his lyric texts in concrete, real situations and localities. Yet, these poems are also timeless, oneiric, existential – as if they were voiced by a contemporary Kohelet. The book confirms Honet’s mastery of language, his adept feel for rhythms and meanings. He constructs the poems so that they make sense and sound as if the rhythm was the most enduring quality, while the contexts might be volatile and fleeting.

The poems collected in Honet’s new volume create a powerfully moving testimony to transience, a reconciliation with one’s own incessant changeability, without options of returning to previous states. These texts turn into contemporary laments, filled with sorrow, grief, even pain; they present no didactic remedy. They constitute a particular kind of action based on experience and emotion; a poetry which demands not so much a commentary or analytical dismantling, but living it.

These are peculiar stories that can be easily encountered by every one of us. They remind us that life does not offer anything permanent; that it changes; that it is full of doubt, loss and the titular grief. At times less tragic, perhaps more nostalgic, but unavoidable. The awareness of grief ’s presence sharpens our insight so that we can perceive, always anew, the complicated nature of the world and of human beings. Honet composes his poetic worlds freely. They may seem quite hermetic, semantically and structurally opaque, tonally dark, ambiguous, entangled, enigmatic, playing imaginative games; nevertheless, they entice with their visions and sounds, with their archetypal foundations.