It might come as a shock to you, but the real father of Polish poetry written in the last twenty years is Piotr Sommer. Look at his clarity, his gentle light as immediately after rain, his landscapes and touches, his fascinating human scale – and find out why.
Tomaz Salamun Piotr Sommer is the great poet of “everyday loneliness, contrary to your self, perhaps”. Like Frank O’Hara, whom he has translated into Polish, he is on the lookout for what he calls “improper names” – the very ones that allow us to construe the unkempt and taciturn world that surrounds us.
John Ashbery Sommer’s main subject is the “quandary-ness” of “ordinary life”: an old dog, the colour and texture of a lemon, a lift in a dilapidated block of flats, the crash of toiletries on a bathroom floor. The art of the poetry – and its art is considerable, singular and memorable – is in the way it matter-of-factly transforms ordinary incident, character, landscape, object, and the assorted interactions thereof, into tiny metaphysical and epistemological essays: investigations into the subjects of language, imagination, impermanence, memory, identity. It is a poetry that engages large subjects through its attentiveness to seemingly small or minor events… There is a quality of otherness in the poetry, or the suggestion of otherness. Boundaries are continually being crossed. There are sallies and retreats. What at first may seem straightforward is, in fact, rather craftily and carefully assembled and held taut in a web of contingencies. Sommer is very much the poet as double-agent, working both sides of the border and travelling incognito.
August Kleinzahler