Poems of trauma and loss, which help the author deal with mourning. Once more, it’s imperative to trust reality, and light, which is on the side of the living.

To look on through the eyes of one’s dead friend, to see her often among the living and to continually hear her voice – this, in short, is the content of the newest volume of poetry by Urszula Honek, entitled Poltergeist. It would not be much of an exaggeration to classify it as a collection of laments. These poems support the illusion of the continued existence of the absent girl. They do not allow her to pass on, reanimating a life that has already passed away, inscribing the silhouette of the dead woman in the “here and now”. “I want to think of her as living” is transformed into “I’ll write of her as if she were alive”. This particular hyper-sensitivity opens the consciousness to what occurs in the crevasse between life and death, spreading wider this basic, ontological frontier. Sometimes it disappears, and shadowy forms circulate between the worlds, which interpenetrate one another. The narrator observes her sleeping husband, trying to ascertain what side of the border he’s on. Fortunately, he’s still alive. But a shadow of uncertainty falls upon everything. It is this that determines the unusual, metaphysical atmosphere of the poems, which is impregnated by considerations on how the world has changed following the passing of her friend. Something obvious and foreseeable was transformed into a great unknown, a mystery, the wobbly being of which had to be firmed up again. The phrase “since she’s been gone” is repeated again and again, and divides life into two stages. In the first, ghosts were only found in horror films, while in the second, they penetrate reality, become visible, can be found at the reach of one’s hand, and “lights are burning in the house, though no hand has turned them on”. The book ends in prose pieces which deepen the mood of otherworldliness. Their composition allows for a crossing over into a brighter side, a completion of mourning, a farewell to the dead.

Karol Maliszewski

Translated by Charles S. Kraszewski

BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ

That night Agnieszka had to find a notepad, call

her old and present friends. To say: she’s not alive, to explain

all the circumstances. Did her hand tremble, her voice crack?

We were sleeping a deep sleep, deep as never before, I told my husband

at dawn.

But it could also have been that

we were watching Berlin Alexanderplatz that night

when Agnieszka draped the night in grey, purple, black.

THE ISLAND

for Grzegorz

Near dawn I observe how light

enters the flat. First there emerge

the contours of the floor, the half-drunk

watermelon nectar that he readied for the swelter.

I stand over my husband tightly wrapped in the covers

checking every now and then if he’s breathing, nudging him lightly.

I’LL ESCAPE WITH HER

My friend was ill, but no one

came to see her.

It was snowing, the footpaths were buried, maybe that’s why

no one found the way to her.

My friend was dying, but no one

knew about it. One December morning

they shovelled the snow from her door, shut off the electricity,

carried out the body.

My friend had her funeral, to which I had to travel

many hours. During the Mass I circled the church

tamping down the snow. I wanted to call my husband,

ask him, Help me open the casket,

I’ll escape with her.

Then someone I hadn’t seen for a long time wanted to embrace me.

I said: I don’t do such things.

WHITE SONG

It’s August, people are bearing bales of hay, children

crouching to pee. Dogs bark at growling engines

and bicycles. The neighbour lady chases us out of the cool house

and into the very eye of the summer heat.

It’s August, there was never any key

to the addition made over into a washroom.

Mr Darek, putting up the panelling,

enters without knocking.

It’s August and for the third time in our lives we dream of Marysia,

our schoolmate. A light seeps under the washroom door

and an immobile shadow appears, leather work boots.

Translated by Charles S. Kraszewski