To the Letter Poems

Rozycki collects moments of illumination - a cat dashing out of a window and 'feral sun' streaking in, a body planting itself in the ground like rhubarb and flowering. He collects and collects, opens a crack, and clutches a shrapnel of epiphany. Tomasz Rozycki's To the Letter follows Lieutenant Anielewicz on the hunt for any clues that might lead 21st century human beings out of a sense of despair. With authoritarianism rising across Eastern Europe, the Lieutenant longs for a secret hero. At first, he suspects some hidden mechanism afoot: fruit tutors him in the ways of colour, he drifts out to sea to study the grammar of tides, or he gazes at the sun as it thrums away like a timepiece. In one poem, he admits 'this is the story of my confusion,' and in the next the Lieutenant is back on the trail. 'This lunacy needs a full investigation,' he jibes. He wants to get to the bottom of it all, but he's often bewitched by letters and the trickery of language. Diacritics on Polish words form a 'flock of sooty flecks, clinging to letters' and Lieutenant Anielewicz studies the tails, accents, and strokes that twist this script. While the Lieutenant can't write a coherent code to solve life's mysteries or to fill the absence of a country rent by war, his search for patterns throughout art, philosophy, and literature lead not to despair but to an affirmation of the importance of human love.