Zielone rolety

The work of Adriana Szymańska is centrally fixed on the map of contemporary Polish poetry. Following the departure of the grandes dames of Polish writing, Wisława Szymborska and Julia Hartwig, it is Szymańska who now speaks most clearly as the voice of that generation of female authors born in the first half of the twentieth century. And hers is a voice that enters upon ever new registers. Not long ago, the State Publishing Institute (PIW) brought out a generous selection of her verse from the years 1968–2019 entitled Nieprzerwany dialog [Unbroken Dialogue]. Such an unbroken dialogue with the reader, regular and constant, returning to familiar themes, constitutes her newer volumes of verse, including Green Blinds (2021). This is a book chock-full of poetic reckonings, balance-sheets and summations, as if the author were trying to compose her Summa – concerning her poetic career on the one hand, and her life on the other. She poses herself some basic questions: “To consider attentively this world’s beauty and wretchedness – / does that mean to revivify that which is born, grows and vanishes?” The volume is filled with musings on ephemerality. She carefully inspects old photographs “Captured in shapely frames / flashes of unbeing”, an old tea-cup once used by her ancestors; she directs a tender gaze at animals and flowers, and looks on humankind with concern. All of this is happening so that she might come together with other beings, other existences “in one unending hymn of thanksgiving”. In this she is similar to Zbigniew Herbert, who was able to create superb “object studies” and who spoke of the poetry of his younger colleague thus: “This is a splendid, mature, juicy and bitter fruit.” Her poetic imagination tending towards religion, Szymańska confronts universal doubt and helplessness. The word “God” appears many times in the poems collected here. In them there shines a peculiar sensitivity of faith and hope bordering on the certainty that the world is greater than that which we are able to encompass with our limited physical senses.