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Wojciech Bonowicz, "Pełne morze / The High Seas"
languages: Polski  / English 
 

"Pełne morze / The High Seas" is a volume of poems with an identifiable pace, having their own special tone, and written in the low and rough registers characteristic of Bonowicz. (Jacek Gutorow)

The beauty of these poems is primarily the beauty of concentration and self-restraint, ellipsis and implicitness, metaphor and ambiguity. Bonowicz dislikes an excess of openly named emotions, or an excess of intellectual speculations. He notes what is seen, touched, heard, thought. He puts together his own and other people's impressions, voices, experiences. He mostly suspends any final conclusions, calling on his readers to formulate them. (Marian Stala)

Source of Polish version: www.biuroliterackie.pl



  • Wojciech Bonowicz
    "Pełne morze / The high seas"
    Biuro Literackie, Wroclaw 2006
    145 x 205, 38 pages, paperback
    ISBN 83-60602-02-6
    www.biuroliterackie.pl


The book has been nominated for the 2007 Nike Literary Award.



"PEŁNE MORZE / THE HIGH SEAS" BY WOJCIECH BONOWICZ
[Excerpts from the described book are literal translations made for the purpose of this article; for the original text go to the Polish version]
Many readers know him as Father Józef Tischner's biographer, but this Krakow-based editor, columnist for "Znak" and "Tygodnik Powszechny", is one of the most interesting poets of the generation entering its forties. Questions about faith and God appear naturally in Bonowicz's poems, but asked in such a way that they seem to belong to poetry rather than religion, and it is in poetry that they can be asked, though this is not where they can be resolved.

Instead of biblical images or references to tradition, though they do appear as well, we more often find the dilemmas of modern times, and the kind of religiousness that has to keep confirming itself anew every day. Thus, God in these poems is not a general kind of God, but God revealed in individual experience: "Who is ashamed to have written about God? / God no longer has the letter: He tears up what we ask for. / He penetrates into memoirs and politely erases / the assertions once dictated by youth and naïve faith" - we read in the poem "Przebaczenie / Forgiveness". The poem "Ostatnia tasma / The Last Tape" is an exception, probably the only direct reference to scenes from the Gospel, an attempt of sorts to translate the scenes from the Last Supper into our times.

"I like situational poems, poems that tell stories. And poems that - like life - do not have a distinctive punch line", Bonowicz says. He is a poet who writes rather modestly, his poems are usually short, without any remarkable playing with words or aiming to surprise. "I cross out more than I write", he adds. "Of the several versions I write down, I most often choose the roughest one". Bonowicz does not need scholarly treatises for a poem, just a single important thought or a sudden, evocative image, like the one in the poem that gave its title to the entire volume. These three short stanzas are a whole separate tale: "He sits a while longer in the warmth / among the scattered clothes / Thinking of the father he bathed here a moment ago".

Yet Bonowicz's poetry, though written seriously, sometimes also reveals the writer's distance towards himself and the world as seen by oneself. In the poem "Latajacy bohater / The Flying Hero" which closes the volume, we read about a momentary, literal ascension. This is a kind of humorous commentary to the serious questions about transcendence which Bonowicz asks in other poems: "I rise and hide from the peaceful gaze / of the air hostess so that I feel a saint for a moment. Ascending / briefly into the heaven that will consume everyone".

Wojciech Bonowicz also takes a look at his own writing, the reason for and the point of writing poetry. In one interview, he commented: "Is the point to 'elucidate' reality by simple explication? Do we really need poetry to tell ourselves: life is short, we are mortal, love is important, full stop?" In the poem "Noc / Night", he writes: "A poem / first encloses you. / It doesn't want / you to look round search / for different words / in different poems. / You sit in a corner of stone / rolled up / like a piece of paper. / ... Finally the poem / will open. The stone / will release you: a piece of paper / that will start to breathe".

Author: Marek Radziwon, Polish version in wiadomosci.gazeta.pl, May 30, 2007 - Polish version

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