Fourteen Minutes: Selecteded Poems

Poetry. Bilingual. Translated by Erik La Prade. FOURTEEN MINUTES is a bilingual (Polish-English) collection of poetry by Tomasz Marek Sobieraj, editor-publisher of Krytyka Literacka, the only independent Polish art-and-letters magazine. The basic subject is the "historical shadows below our daily living, the evil period of the Holocaust and other inhuman atrocities" (Peter Thabit Jones). "The poetic voice powering the poems in this very impressive collection is that of a poet who sees, to quote the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, 'the dearest freshness deep down things.' One also senses a mind always aware of the mad and uneasy historical shadows below our daily living, the evil period of the Holocaust and other inhuman atrocities. This is a writer whose sharp intelligence is evident in his matured vision, a writer who observes and controls his use of language in a careful mannner. The result is poems that reward the reader with sensuous descriptions and striking lines that stick like burrs in the mind."--Peter Thabit Jones "Marek Sobieraj is a genuine poet writing in the magnificent Polish tradition of Nobel laureates, Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz. With a gifted spirit he investigates what is possible to say about his life, now, from the heart of Europe: 'After all, history / does not have to repeat itself, Now I let myself be seduced / like an insect, / tempted by the aroma of ripe apples.'"--Nils Hav "In his 'Boy in the Fog' poet Tomasz Marek Sobieraj, following a young collector who will gather insects, says that the lad's jar "will become the destiny for some of them, / a train to extermination of small living creatures / gassed with ether and pierced with a pin / in a small Auschwitz / of a child's room.' The poet's daring here is enormous, his Holocaust reference absurd, of course, but not for the specimens themselves. And at the center of the poet's eye is the fog through which we and the boy move, the stars rising, losing 'the innocent color of raspberries / to take on the lush eroticism of a ripe orange.' I have been that (perhaps pubescent) boy...Then, I had to catch my breath as, in his next poem, Sobeiraj, giving no quarter, says that a German couple in their graves (d. 1926, but no matter the date) existed 'like grass, an insect, / a bird.' Such is the dimension of the poet's vision. He says he knows what is within any photograph, 'and beyond its edge.' He sometimes turns his head away from death, but feels connected to an IV for metastatic cancer. He pretends to read. And for the poet, resurrection is theatre. Lionel Trilling, praising Robert Frost, said that only a poet who terrifies us can satisfy us. In the final poem here, FOURTEEN MINUTES (the duration of gassings at Kulmenhof), Sobieraj returns us to the nadir of all human history. It is as though the boy in the fog has become one of the Sonderkommando who, after a long day's work of extermination, drinks and laughs and takes snapshots (that photograph image again). What more is there to say? Here, we are in the presence of a master poet who trusts us with his deepest convictions, and for this we must be grateful. We are within him as he translates himself, and are mesmerized."--William Heyen