Glosy / Voices

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"Should poetry not be particularly sensitive to the anonymous, unuttered message, consumed by the noise of death and the chaos of lies?" – we read in a brief note attached to the collection. Polkowski, through a cycle of eighteen poems, answered his own question. He gave voice to the victims of a massacre that was as much a physical massacre as it was, in the long run, a psychological one. Of course, he could not give voice to everyone, only to some: five who were shot, one wounded, four grieving mothers, two fathers, two sons, two wives, one fiancée, and one brother. But this was entirely sufficient to grasp the atmosphere of life in that irreparably trauma-marked human community, the scale of the loss it suffered, the emotional depth of experienced misfortune, the Sisyphean tasks of memory and forgetting, and the struggle of imagination with the unimaginable.