The fruits of almost forty years of poetry writing are gathered together in the new two-volume edition of Tadeusz Różewicz's poems [Poezja]. The 1988 edition recapitulates, with only minor changes, the 1976 volume Poezje zebrane and adds to the earlier collection approximately fifty new works that have appeared in print during the last decade or so.

It will come as no surprise to readers who are familiar with Różewicz's poetry that the post–1976 poems are centered on two obsessive themes: the depressing inevitability of death, and the inadequacy of poetry in the contemporary world. Różewicz began his literary career by writing about mass death in wartime, the death of the young, and the death of faith in ethical values and human decency. His poems were full of restrained anger, tightly controlled, deliberately denuded of pretty decorative effects. In the 1960s he began to experiment with longer and looser forms and to explore erotic and sensual themes. His latest poems, from the 1980s, hark back to his earlier work, particularly to the poems of the late fifties and early sixties, when his briefly expressed Stalinist enthusiasms were well behind him.

The last two poems in Poezja are representative of the ways in which the development of Różewicz as a poet has come full circle. In the next-to-last, “Ołowiany żołnierzyk” (“Tin Soldier”), the poet reminds us that the major battles of the twentieth century have faded into memory as harmless, painted still lifes; and the poet, who should be raising his voice against the preparation of the new machinery of slaughter, has grown too tired to play his role. The same sense of a slow fading away of the poet, and also of the powers of poetry, is expressed in the final, untitled poem, which begins “Słabnie poeta” (The poet weakens). Building around the conceit of Rimbaud's famous synesthetic assignment of colors to the French vowels, Różewicz reaches the melancholy and familiar conclusion that poetry has been effaced by the postatomic age.

between two wars
images turned white
metaphors turned white
A blanc E blanc I blanc
O blanc U blanc
in the glare of the atom bomb
eyes lips turned white
the shape of the world turned white