Sic! Warsaw 2006 135 x 205 80 pages hardcover ISBN 83-88807-94-3 Translation rights: Sic!
Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz
Good-Bye to the Rooks
Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz's Good-Bye to the Rooks is the latest link in a chain of philosophical meditations inspired by the poet's garden in Milanówek. The author takes us to his private world to state that its existence, the reality of the senses, is mined with death. Could life be an excess, no more, when compared to nothingness? And yet we can be none too sure that whatever is not life should be called nothingness: "Nothingness will be another side of sorts/ The other side of the feeder of snow and pines." Impermanence is not expressed here with a sorrowful groan, but rather a euphoric feeling of brotherhood with all the creatures that take part in this process. The animals inhabiting the garden are the poet's companions on his way to the end, as are the poems the author recalls or that have been particularly important for him, Mandelstam’s and the work of other Russian poets; they make up a crowded procession, so to speak, of creatures striding into the unknown. They are sad, but not despairing. These distichs are bursting with the details of existence, these songs of death mock life, an uncompromising conversation goes on between the living and the dead, nature doesn't fall silent when a single man does. Rymkiewicz's new poems are anti-threnodies, anti-elegies, anti-laments, ambiguous pieces which seek to create a Norwidian state of "un-thinking." This is not the same as thoughtlessness, but rather a feeling of deep attachment with being, a contemplation which can free a person from impatience and the pretensions of thinking he can possess total knowledge over himself. This might be the origin of the mantra-like flow of Rymkiewicz's work, the short stanzas, suggestive rhymes, his tendency to make intellectually sophisticated poems resemble folk songs, the seeming simplicity and invalidity of works that appear to have come about incidentally, that are simply told and not forged out of the language, not woven from philosophical language. It is not long before a moment arrives in which the reader - even one unused to Rymkiewicz's riddles - figures out that they have been taken in by this false simplicity. The irony and antitheses that are this poet's hallmarks require us to not only interpret his gestures with caution, but also to inquire into something more important than the gesture: What should concern us: the fact that we are impermanent, or rather life, which would not exist at all if we were permanent?
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