Sobbing superpower Selected poems of Tadeusz Różewicz

*Starred Review* High among the many brilliant Polish poets in the generation most affected by WWII stands Rozewicz, who turns 90 this year. Unlike the 10-years-older Czeslaw Milosz (a friend), who was deliberately literary, Rozewicz has been an antipoet, for whom the formal devices of traditional poetic beauty were murdered in the war. He strives to write the truth of our times, at the center of which is the Holocaust of the Jews. This retrospective collection begins with terse, elliptical poems first collected in 1947, which with longing and brusqueness report and reflect on what the war destroyed. None of them is more starkly beautiful than the first, Rose the name he gave a young Jewish woman who perished and also a symbol of perished poetry. While Rozewicz's style opened up, so that his latest poems include the longest ones, Rose and the trains to the death camps that he saw recur constantly, often juxtaposed with what has happened to his friends and the world since aging, death, and new assaults on humanity, such as mad cow disease and revived Polish anti-Semitism. Highly personal and raconteurish, Rozewicz's late verse most resembles Charles Bukowski's among his American contemporaries, and not inaptly, for both contain, inflected with anger and humor, the saddest music in the world.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2010 Booklist

In the great constellation of postwar and contemporary Polish poets, Rozewicz has been a sort of dark star: neither pellucidly wise nor gravely witty, in the manner of Nobel laureates Milosz and Symborska, Rozewicz's gritty, ragged verse has for more than half a century given his responses to the unanswerable conditions of history, beginning with the Holocaust and WWII. Rozewicz truly came into his own in the 1960s and in the 1990s, when longer forms given to free association allowed him to write without pretending that writing could alleviate the injustice that pervades any society. Trzeciak's stripped-down translation (as her foreword explains) tries to convey both Rozewicz's plain speech and his frequently intricate allusion to writers and works from Polish, German, Russian, and English, among them Franz Kafka and Ezra Pound. "Of course I try to write/ light carefree / even with my left foot/ but it's tethered to a stone," a recent poem complains in a poetry able to incorporate almost anything, from headlines to the simplest sentences a child might say, which a disillusioned adult might need to hear again: "this is a man/ this is a tree this is bread// people eat to live." (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.