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Posts
A rising star in Polish letters explores faith, eros, death and the making of poems in these deft, personal musings.
Hailed in Poland as "the hope of Polish poetry" and the inheritor of its metaphysical tradition, Dabrowski offers these "posts" from city streets and trains, his bedroom and Skype, a hospital and his own notebook, employing colloquial language to confront weighty subjects: "And right here /poetry appears, and forces a stag to bolt / in front of the hood of your car."
Tadeusz Dabrowski is the author of six books and recipient of numerous awards, and his work has been translated into 20 languages.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones's brilliant translations have twice won her the Found in Translation Award.
Hailed in Poland as "the hope of Polish poetry" and the inheritor of its metaphysical tradition, Dabrowski offers these "posts" from city streets and trains, his bedroom and Skype, a hospital and his own notebook, employing colloquial language to confront weighty subjects: "And right here /poetry appears, and forces a stag to bolt / in front of the hood of your car."
Tadeusz Dabrowski is the author of six books and recipient of numerous awards, and his work has been translated into 20 languages.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones's brilliant translations have twice won her the Found in Translation Award.
- GenresPoetry
128 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2017
About the author
Tadeusz Dąbrowski
22 books12 followersTadeusz Dąbrowski is a Polish poet, essayist, and critic. Editor of the literary bimonthly Topos, he has been published in many journals in his native country (among others, Tygodnik Powszechny and Polityka) and abroad (including Boston Review, The American Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland, AGNI Online, and Poetry Wales). He is the winner of numerous awards, including the Kościelski Prize (2009), the Hubert Burda Prize (2008), and the Prize of the Foundation for Polish Culture (2006), and was nominated for the NIKE Literary Award (2010). His work has been translated into twenty languages. Dąbrowski is the author of seven volumes of poetry: Wypieki (1999), e-mail (2000), mazurek (2002), Te Deum (2005, 2008), Czarny kwadrat (2009), Pomiędzy (2013), and Schwarzes Quadrat auf schwarzem Grund (2010, 2011), as well as a collection of poetry in English entitled Black Square (Zephyr Press, 2011), and editor of the anthology Poza slowa: Antologia wierszy 1976–2006 (2006). He lives in Gdańsk on the Baltic coast of Poland. (Update 8/2013)
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 16, 2026
Poetry, for Tadeusz Dabrowksi, is like this:
Both poetically and literally, this is unexpected simile: open-sea trawling is not a typical catchment method for crabs nor are crabs a conventional conceit for poetry. It's almost as if the poet were starting out with a metaphor intended for another topic: as the cliches go, fish—like words and like lovers—are abundant in the sea and the poet or the lover, like a fisherman, must venture out, cast broader nets and explore new horizons ("there are many fish in the sea," is the refrain told to someone after a breakup). This poet, however, dragging his net, pulls out something different: a crab. But not just an ordinary crab, a gigantic crab that resembles the poet ("much the same as you") and then speaks back to say, "Can't you do your bloody fishing elsewhere?" Poetry, for Dabrowski, is something surprising but also something familiar, something the "same" as you, and yet not what you are necessarily looking for, something with claws—something hostile and vulgar.
Dabrowksi's poems are often set in unromantic places: on a Zoom call; in a Microsoft page; in big, impersonal cities; on train rides; in a hospital room; in an inescapably labyrinthine shopping mall. His attention is drawn to bleak visions: a man beating his wife; winos lurching through the streets at night (like "nematodes crawling out of sewers"); a woman with stroke-induced facial paralysis; the poster of a missing black boy, the ink having run out ("he is unlucky he was born black, because the ink destined for him runs out faster"—a bitterly sardonic line which presupposes not just that the printer ink would run out but that the boy was always predestined to go missing). The speaker in many of Dabrowski's poems is harsh, cynical, and misogynistic ("don't send down on me a brand new woman without fingerprints who'll infallibly prove to be not what I took her for," he writes, reiterating a mythic idea of woman as Pandora, as an enchanting but lethal misery inflicted on mankind). Dabrowksi's poetic imaginings are often unconventional and unpoetic—mundane, urban, digital—and his voice has a straight-male, once-divorced disaffectedness. In this, the collection is reminiscent of the poetry of Charles Bukowski, alternating between cavalier chutzpah and lonely elegiacs.
In "Bunny Slope", Debrowski compares poetry-writing to skiing. "When I'm writing a poem, there's less and less of it," he writes. As he approaches the mountains, the mountains become less visible, disappearing behind the hill and the bunny slope. But then, once face to face with the mountain, he is speechless. A poem, therefore, is written halfway between the hill and the mountain: the mountain is visible but not fully visible. The poet is not skiing down the hill but nor is he looking up contemplating an ineffable sublime (one imagines him here on a ski-lift advancing slowly upwards). A poem is partial and incomplete, written neither in the course of action nor in the immanent experience of something transcendent. Like the crab, it is not what you were looking for: the fun of skiing or the grandeur of nature. Poetry emerges from the rocks and crags of everyday life, not atop the hill like some Romantic prophet towering over creation.
As with many of his other poems, Dabrowski's collection evinces a skepticism toward language. "People exchange words, words exchange people," he writes as if language were just the perfunctory business of the day. Words are banal but words are also treacherous: "In every word you have a secret drawer for lies." You say "darling I betrayed you," but you expect the answer, "Don't be silly, honey, better give me a hug." Evoking Raymond Carver, Dabrowski sees words as just a trite way to avoid saying what you really mean to say, a ready-made arsenal for evasion and avoidance rather than communication and candor. It is a problem compounded by technology:
The poet is now online. His words are autosuggested by the thesaurus, and he is no longer sure what he himself is saying and who is talking. Are the words on the page even his own, or are they text-predicted automations? Logged in, he is cheating outside the box only to cheat inside a new box: the computer. The poet, the wordsmith, has become conjoined with his computer, the word processor. He is now three clicks away from knowledge, but no closer to finding happiness, severed from his own words and his own authentic experience of the world. Poetry is not safe from this digital devolution: contemplating his own screen, he thinks, "the pixels of words closely conceal your forgotten dream," as if the very graphic rendering of words, not just the words themselves, were a form of obfuscation.
There is a solemn lament for modern man in these poems. "Once there was a man who was neither happy nor sad," Dabrowski writes at the start of one poem, invoking the tone of a fairy tale. This man was sent to hospital, told to read newspapers, then told to watch TV, then was "bombarded with pornography" and then when this did nothing, was presented "presented with stacks of books by French existentialists." While he did feel nausea, it wasn't because of Sartre's Nausea but because of some spoiled fish he ate. This mythic man is all modern consumer, a man without emotional excitation because his life is carceral, confined to a hospital and programmed by doctors. In the end, trying to sleep, he pours out a single tear which, analysis reveals, has a chemical composition "not at all different from that of a normal tear." Modern man is still a human being but human life has been replaced by a regime of supervisors prescribing what to watch, scientists analyzing his tears but not understanding what they mean. He has been made an object and denied a subjectivity.
Dabrowski's poems invite readers to embrace their own imagination, to see the world—the ugly, grim, sad world—and to discard the old cliches and tired conventional ways of seeing. On a train, the trees seem to move, the train seems still. When the train stops, "the trees pretend to be woods." While Dabrowski's poetic voice sometimes sounds like Bukowski, with a similarly grating sense of male alienation, his vision of the world is Stevensian, reversing and inverting the real world and subordinating it to the imagination, imbuing nature with animacy and intention in the poet's mind. But in his own unique way, Dabrowski focuses our attention on the grit and bleakness of city life and website traffic and reawakens the unpoetic with poetic novelty and strangeness.
you sail out onto the sea,
cast your net, pull it through millions of tons
of water and finally catch a gigantic crab
much as the same as you, which says: Can't you do
your bloody fishing somewhere else?
Both poetically and literally, this is unexpected simile: open-sea trawling is not a typical catchment method for crabs nor are crabs a conventional conceit for poetry. It's almost as if the poet were starting out with a metaphor intended for another topic: as the cliches go, fish—like words and like lovers—are abundant in the sea and the poet or the lover, like a fisherman, must venture out, cast broader nets and explore new horizons ("there are many fish in the sea," is the refrain told to someone after a breakup). This poet, however, dragging his net, pulls out something different: a crab. But not just an ordinary crab, a gigantic crab that resembles the poet ("much the same as you") and then speaks back to say, "Can't you do your bloody fishing elsewhere?" Poetry, for Dabrowski, is something surprising but also something familiar, something the "same" as you, and yet not what you are necessarily looking for, something with claws—something hostile and vulgar.
Dabrowksi's poems are often set in unromantic places: on a Zoom call; in a Microsoft page; in big, impersonal cities; on train rides; in a hospital room; in an inescapably labyrinthine shopping mall. His attention is drawn to bleak visions: a man beating his wife; winos lurching through the streets at night (like "nematodes crawling out of sewers"); a woman with stroke-induced facial paralysis; the poster of a missing black boy, the ink having run out ("he is unlucky he was born black, because the ink destined for him runs out faster"—a bitterly sardonic line which presupposes not just that the printer ink would run out but that the boy was always predestined to go missing). The speaker in many of Dabrowski's poems is harsh, cynical, and misogynistic ("don't send down on me a brand new woman without fingerprints who'll infallibly prove to be not what I took her for," he writes, reiterating a mythic idea of woman as Pandora, as an enchanting but lethal misery inflicted on mankind). Dabrowksi's poetic imaginings are often unconventional and unpoetic—mundane, urban, digital—and his voice has a straight-male, once-divorced disaffectedness. In this, the collection is reminiscent of the poetry of Charles Bukowski, alternating between cavalier chutzpah and lonely elegiacs.
In "Bunny Slope", Debrowski compares poetry-writing to skiing. "When I'm writing a poem, there's less and less of it," he writes. As he approaches the mountains, the mountains become less visible, disappearing behind the hill and the bunny slope. But then, once face to face with the mountain, he is speechless. A poem, therefore, is written halfway between the hill and the mountain: the mountain is visible but not fully visible. The poet is not skiing down the hill but nor is he looking up contemplating an ineffable sublime (one imagines him here on a ski-lift advancing slowly upwards). A poem is partial and incomplete, written neither in the course of action nor in the immanent experience of something transcendent. Like the crab, it is not what you were looking for: the fun of skiing or the grandeur of nature. Poetry emerges from the rocks and crags of everyday life, not atop the hill like some Romantic prophet towering over creation.
As with many of his other poems, Dabrowski's collection evinces a skepticism toward language. "People exchange words, words exchange people," he writes as if language were just the perfunctory business of the day. Words are banal but words are also treacherous: "In every word you have a secret drawer for lies." You say "darling I betrayed you," but you expect the answer, "Don't be silly, honey, better give me a hug." Evoking Raymond Carver, Dabrowski sees words as just a trite way to avoid saying what you really mean to say, a ready-made arsenal for evasion and avoidance rather than communication and candor. It is a problem compounded by technology:
I've cheated, but outside the box, so once I withdraw from it,
once I log out (the dictionary's suggesting
"I loll about" or "I dog lout", I don't quite know
where I am, what I'm saying, who's talking), I'll be someone else...
The poet is now online. His words are autosuggested by the thesaurus, and he is no longer sure what he himself is saying and who is talking. Are the words on the page even his own, or are they text-predicted automations? Logged in, he is cheating outside the box only to cheat inside a new box: the computer. The poet, the wordsmith, has become conjoined with his computer, the word processor. He is now three clicks away from knowledge, but no closer to finding happiness, severed from his own words and his own authentic experience of the world. Poetry is not safe from this digital devolution: contemplating his own screen, he thinks, "the pixels of words closely conceal your forgotten dream," as if the very graphic rendering of words, not just the words themselves, were a form of obfuscation.
There is a solemn lament for modern man in these poems. "Once there was a man who was neither happy nor sad," Dabrowski writes at the start of one poem, invoking the tone of a fairy tale. This man was sent to hospital, told to read newspapers, then told to watch TV, then was "bombarded with pornography" and then when this did nothing, was presented "presented with stacks of books by French existentialists." While he did feel nausea, it wasn't because of Sartre's Nausea but because of some spoiled fish he ate. This mythic man is all modern consumer, a man without emotional excitation because his life is carceral, confined to a hospital and programmed by doctors. In the end, trying to sleep, he pours out a single tear which, analysis reveals, has a chemical composition "not at all different from that of a normal tear." Modern man is still a human being but human life has been replaced by a regime of supervisors prescribing what to watch, scientists analyzing his tears but not understanding what they mean. He has been made an object and denied a subjectivity.
Dabrowski's poems invite readers to embrace their own imagination, to see the world—the ugly, grim, sad world—and to discard the old cliches and tired conventional ways of seeing. On a train, the trees seem to move, the train seems still. When the train stops, "the trees pretend to be woods." While Dabrowski's poetic voice sometimes sounds like Bukowski, with a similarly grating sense of male alienation, his vision of the world is Stevensian, reversing and inverting the real world and subordinating it to the imagination, imbuing nature with animacy and intention in the poet's mind. But in his own unique way, Dabrowski focuses our attention on the grit and bleakness of city life and website traffic and reawakens the unpoetic with poetic novelty and strangeness.
August 15, 2018
Posts is a beautiful, but cutting volume of Polish poetry. The translation gives English readers a series of lyrical poems filled with painful realism. I wish I knew how to read Polish as the original language poems are included as well, and I would love to compare how their changed in translation.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews