11/07/2022
Foksal acknowledges, in this pained and incisive collection, that “hundreds of authors/ with millions of words/ have already described/ all shades of evil,” yet the author (most recently of the story collection Hour Between Late Night and Early Morning) still endeavors at—and succeeds at—expressing fresh truth, insight, and outrage about the horrors humanity visits upon humanity, as well as the ache of domestic isolation. Especially in its earliest pages, before the focus turns more personal, this volume’s poems live up to its title as Foksal contrasts, with penetrating indignation, everyday neighborhood scenes with the inevitability of violence: “Will the ceiling/ hold up when bombs/ start to fall?” asks “In the Cellar,” after offering a touching survey of a basement’s forgotten clutter. “A Silent Witness,” meanwhile, condemns the apathy of the sky itself, asking “who has seen more barbarity,/ more acts depraved, more/abuses of power”?
Tellingly, it doesn’t occur to Foksal’s outraged narrator to blame a god, just the empty sky itself. Later, in “The Monochrome,” Foksal refers to clocks in towers (a frequent subject) as “those ungodly gods/ looking down/ on us,” decrying them as “lofty and detached.” Disquiet at the indifferent measuring and parceling of time powers several of these poems, and a mournful sense of isolation beats at the heart of many others, especially later in the collection.
There, Foksal writes movingly of failures of connection, even in established and intimate relationships, whether yearning for a chance touch. “Surface Tension” exemplifies the poet’s precision of language and command of deep, familiar feeling, recounting what it’s like to spot one’s reflection in surfaces like “the potbelly of a spoon” but then, devastatingly, not recognizing it “in the specters of her/ eyes.” The editor and founder of The Nonconformist, an English-language literary magazine in Poland, Foksal proves adept at striking verse of clarity and communicative power.
Takeaway: Pained, potent verse examining life and loneliness in an era of violence.
Great for fans of: Wojciech Bonowicz, Marzanna Bogumiła Kielar.
Production grades Cover: A Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: A Marketing copy: A-
2022-10-06
A volume of poems focuses on the state of the world.
Violence, war, time, and mortality are recurring themes in this collection by Foksal, a Polish author and the founder of the literary magazine The Nonconformist. “In the Cellar” describes the seemingly forgotten contents of the titular room. He analyzes different kinds of rain and their implications in “Ode to the Trenches,” imagining the sky as a silent witness to humanity’s barbarism. “In the Beginning Was the End” transports readers to a prison cell. The author rails against the hypocrisy of the rich in one poem and contemplates the ambiguity of good and evil in another. He mourns the death of subtlety and yearns to be free of “the binary world” and its rules. In “Surface Tension,” the speaker struggles to recognize his reflection in various objects and, later, himself in the eyes of a woman. He seeks yet fails to find a connection with his partner in several poems. He describes feeling like “a shuttered house / or an island long shunned / in an archipelago / of masterful misery” in one poem and like a “a barren receptacle” in another. Memories seem to inform many poems, such as a clock tower that once hovered ominously over the speaker’s family and the empty seashells of summers past. Foksal effectively uses alliteration in lines like “a shortcut / you used to take, / located somewhere / between a fatigued / façade and a bench / bare.” He brings inanimate objects to life with his evocative descriptions, including an old bicycle “limping on one wheel,” a pile of potatoes “huddling in the corner,” and a coin that “tap-dances” on a bar. He depicts emotions in novel and effective ways: “At times I feel / the phantom of fear gallop / through my veins, / tenebrous and tight.” The one flaw of this striking and moving volume is the lack of a human presence; there are thoughts and feelings but few flesh-and-blood people in these poems.
A poignant, impressive, and pessimistic collection of poetry.
