Rózewicz's poetry is firmly grounded in Poland and in his experiences during and post-WWII, yet it also manages to be timelessly, universally human. The title poem "The Survivor" encapsulates the dichotomies that many other pieces contain: "virtue and crime / truth and falsehood / beauty and ugliness / courage and cowardice." Rózewicz takes on big themes - love, death, art, war, history - and shrinks them down to human proportions, to things that can be grasped within the hands. A stand-out example is the poem "In the Midst of Life." "After the end of the world / after death / I found myself in the midst of life," the narrator begins. Following the apocalypse, death, things that cannot even be described, the narrator is forced to grapple (as all WWII survivors, all tragedy survivors, must) with the fact of still being alive in the world. He does so by naming the everyday objects around him and forcing himself to recognize their purposes: "this is a table I said / this is a table / on the table is bread a knife / a knife is to cut bread / people live on bread." What could be a gloomy poem instead reinforces, through commonplaces imagery and language, the complexity of life - the difficulty of being human, of being aware simultaneously of the best and worst in humanity. Other works, such as "My Poetry," explore Ró¿ewicz's complicated relationship with art and creativity and his poetic principles, "its own possibilities / and limitations." I could write a dissertation on "Draft of a Modern Love Poem," so I will say nothing about it other than it should be read by everyone everywhere, and I hope that will eventually be translated into every language.
The translations are tidy, using straight-forward, simple language that nevertheless vigorously communicates the joys of the ordinary and the horrors of atrocity. Since Rózewicz does not punctuate his poetry, the reader has a certain amount of freedom of interpretation and is forced to think about where to pause, to play with mental-punctuation and to participate in the work. Rózewicz's poetry, his themes and images, resonate together symphonically. His work is firmly grounded in the present without any nostalgia for a glorified past or yearning for a better future, although his historical awareness informs his contextualization of the present. Rózewicz does the near-impossible, without losing an ounce of poetic sensibility he depicts life simply, as it is.
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