To the Letter by Tomasz Różycki, translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal, Archipelago Books, 2024
“It’s my word, my letters against your minutes,” writes Tomasz Różycki in To the Letter, the most recent English-language volume from the distinguished Polish poet. The line concludes the poem “Shadow,” in which the speaker—himself already “gone, no longer”—addresses an equally enigmatic audience: “From the shadows / perhaps you’re watching me pass through the gate.” Such confrontations between experiential time and textual consciousness, individual mortality and the ghosts of cultural consciousness, reverberate throughout this collection. The speaking voice of these poems is always aware of itself as text—a part of history inhabiting a living reader.
The book’s macrocosm integrates Jungian insights about how the shadows of history intermingle with the personal and cultural shadows of the living. In literature, these exchanges are facilitated through the act of reading, and To the Letter presents various perspectives on—and within—this process, incorporating allegorical considerations of the reader-writer, as well as direct addresses to the mutable beloved facing the pages. In collaborative, interdependent structures (numerical sequencing, narrative fragments, various configurations of speaker and addressee, and dream-like recurrences of theme, image, and setting), Różycki displays the dynamics between unconscious and conscious, self and other, individual and culture, all captured in a fine translation by Mira Rosenthal. Her English iterations fully relay the poems’ accessibility, music, and humor—as well as the ways they integrate into surprising valences with creativity, love, and interbeing. Within them, one identifies an existentially grounded, metaphysically nimble soul, intrinsically defying the authoritarian project that empowers itself by convincing people that they are drastically oversimplified, reified versions of themselves.
The central character in the collection is Lieutenant Anielewicz, who often appears in cameos. His unexpected arrivals, usually in a capacity of investigation or covert sabotage, befit the historical Mordechai Anielewicz, a leader of the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto. In using this character to stage ongoing psychological engagement with creativity, trauma, and finality, Różycki finds both literal and metaphorical affinities between the commander’s resistance against the Nazi genocide, and the poet’s evocations of the soul’s potentially destructive aspects.
We learn at the end of “The Clock” that “Lieutenant Anielewicz, in a vacant spot, / installs the clockworkmechanism of the bomb.” This action clarifies a pronoun in the middle of the poem, which seemed to be without referent upon first reading:
When it explodes,
all matter will collapse. A small black hole
will form to eclipse the cosmic body
suddenly, mid-conversation, creating a vacuumthat siphon’s off the district’s oxygen supply
from under the doorsteps where your friends reside. . .(italics added)
The poem’s associative structure reflects a mind half-submerged in its contents; its opening quietly embodies the psychological perceptiveness and sensitivity within which such meditations may take place: “So many caverns in the body, chambers / abandoned once and for all, darkened corners.” Suppressing such shadowy associations of death can indulge fantasies of both authority and rebellion. Yet when they are literalized in violent ways, they can be dangerous on both psychological and social levels—an overlap indicated in the threat to “the cosmic body.” The shadow, like Anielewicz, represents a dynamic connection between the individual and cultural psyche: potentially revelatory when consciously attended, dangerous when left to operate in the darkness.
One possible presentation of these “darkened corners” opens in “Scenario”:
There are scenes
on TV, if no one’s watching a bit inadvertently,
aimed right at you, a transmission in code:
Won’t you give us fire? Or: strike me down.
The double emphasis on the oblique perception of television is consistent with certain ways in which we encounter the shadow—via projection, cultural material, or apparent coincidence—while the Promethean references underline the archetypal scene from which the poem momentarily distracted us:
But let’s return
to the broadcast: on the scene, Lieutenant Anielewicz
lays out the bodies according to the sequence of events.
Here again, the poem complicates a historical understanding of Anielewicz, as he appears to be actively reconstructing—or writing—the history in which he also figures: “the bodies” equating with letters and words. The collection as a whole, then, appears to be building a textual world in which “Anielewicz” can be more comprehensively perceived, in different settings, from different perspectives, framing his various aspects.
Within these contexts, the Anielewicz of To the Letter paradoxically appears to investigate the crimes that killed his historical namesake—in part, perhaps, to help the reader see through the easy equation that authoritarianism can be neatly inverted with “some future revolution / and redistribution of goods, with all the oppressed / eagerly writing laws.” But beyond this social critique, the recurring moments of disorientation resemble a ghost attempting to discover why it remains in this world and what has been left undone or misunderstood.
This ghostly quality often transfers to the addressees of the poems. “Vacuum Theory” opens to one such ironic premise: “I wish you were here, I say to the room.” Within this playful mindset, the speaker intuitively explores images, gradually deepening their implications for the way consciousness itself divides the world in perception and thought:
Through clouds, the light
slices leaves on the path, slices each lungful,
it cuts this life in two, so that the half outside
trembles in a breath-cloud. No way to tellthe halves apart:
The eerie passage evokes the way we are both mirrored by and enmeshed within the world, even as we are alienated from it by the means of our understanding. With an overflowing sentence, Różycki syntactically mirrors the mind’s intuitive journey through the permeable membranes between the physical and the mental. Moving from the mind’s outwardly projected perspective of itself, certain implications of a psychic absence arises, and the mystery of the reader conjoins with a cold eventuality: “And aren’t I losing writing, losing conversation, / word after word right now? // So, am I less and less while you are more?”
The intriguing conclusion returns “the halves” of the poem, speaker and addressee, to a shared experience of consciousness: “Will loss then lose its subject to the object? / If something’s gone, you lack what’s yours— / when that happens to you, you’re no longer god.” In retrospect, the opening scene resembles prayer, and as the poem follows the desire for a reified reader—or god—to its psychological ends, a model of spiritual honesty is revealed. In a corresponding poetic mystery, this prayer for connection may even be answered by the reader’s experience: taking in these lines, do we not desire, after all, to be present in our own internal emptiness, with its profound potentiality for connection?
“Message” shows how the Anielewicz poems correspond with such engagements with the reader, opening with: “What else can I tell you, what more can I write? / That I perform every act quite cautiously, / cover every trace of us.” From a dual reference to the activities of the covert Anielewicz and a writer disguising autobiographical subject matter, the poem turns to the former:
A shadow sways
behind each letter, a place often crowded
with refugees, forever in between, stuck midway.I’ve hidden in the details whatever remains:
a screw to some unknown machine left
in a drawer. In vain, Lieutenant Anielewicz
rearranges the bodies, trying to find a message.
Here, the “shadow” reflects the speaker himself as a literary hiding place. This expansive, mutable space “behind each letter” calls towards that distinction between lived experience and the atemporal psyche—it opens a different view of Anielewicz, who is looking through the “bodies” for “a message,” like a reader annotating for connections within a text. In her Translator’s Afterword, Rosenthal points out that Anielewicz is related etymologically to “angel.” Angel also means “messenger” in Greek; an angel looking for a message is, therefore, searching for their own purpose, the lives they are to synapse.
In this aspect, Anielewicz’s interpretive activities relate to all the past writers who had spent their lives sending messages toward a distant reader, and the arrangement of corpses and textual bodies present two opposite conceptions of the relationship between power and communication. Elsewhere, the shadow of mortality is expressed through an imagined congress of writers. “Details” invokes “the dead, who now crowd around me / in great number at the kitchen table to pluck out / these maggot letters.” Still, within the creative process, agency shifts:
I was consumed, was food
for them, these letters that hatched inside mein a festering wound, in flesh, in mud, silt, waste.
Life, as you know, is but a burning, eating, breaking
down of organic matter into elementary bits,
plus some details irrelevant to chemistry.
An acute awareness of death, prompted by the presence of texts, turns towards “these letters” consuming the mortal speaker. Nevertheless, this process also offers its own manner of liberation; when poetry can break down something publicly embroidered to something privately shivered, it lives on in the reader by helping them replicate the process. Such moments of metaphysical grounding can feel heavy, and it’s a testament to Różycki’s tonal sensitivity that he is able to counter-balance this density with ironic humor, as in “Phantom”:
we should be dead already. But this jealousy
is a thorn in the side—despite the fact that you’renot here, we have made progress in the art
of fashioning your phantom, and we’re good at it
The jealousy directed towards prior writers, ironically invoked as frustration at not yet being dead, is flipped and turned into consolation: at least one can be “good at” discussing the canonically deceased. Moreover, the living bond in these endeavors of comparison: “it’s good that you’re not here. Your singularity / would grow immense—since each of us still carries / a hollow for you inside our hearts.” This “hollow” completes another strange loop in which the reader is equated with passed writers, who couldn’t have possibly imagined us on the other side of their pages. Seen from this perspective, we might read Różycki’s humor as a practice of both resilience and creative flexibility, moving between conceptions before any harden into reifications.
In certain places, such fluidity may relate to Anielewicz’s heightened consciousness of his mutuality. In “The Measure of All Things,” the space between poet and character is bridged intuitively—if haltingly:
And so, the signs
at last lead Anielewicz to identifya plot: there’s someone waiting to outwit necessity,
the normal course of human life—this lunacy
needs full investigation, a measure of all things
he can apply to man as if he were an insect.
In showing the unconscious aspects of our machinations undoing themselves, Różycki again presents a difference between the dictator seeking historical immortality and the poet desiring the work’s survival; the poet is self-reflective, bringing Anielewicz and all of his attendant psychological and cultural subtleties into these pages—some of which include the negative capability of the work itself. In the process, the rational and fantasy aspects of the psyche are held in taunt contrast, and brought into dialogue.
Bringing these existential questions home, “What Makes No Motion?” asks, “So what remains?”, and answering, in part, “the soul escaping through holes.” The soul’s paradoxical escape from the text takes place by allowing for future writing, for life’s continuation: “Only unfinished rows of letters // are dead, but luckily the page holds blanks, / some bits of space not yet filled up with marks.” With this acceptance, Anielewicz also transforms:
It’s very, very beautiful—Lieutenant Anielewicz
sets down his autopsy tools: the saw, the forceps,
the scissors, and sings an old, old tune, touched deeply.
The first line above presents a recurrent strategy of addressing Anielewicz within a sentence that narrates him, allowing the moment to resonate for both speaker and character. But in the final two poems, the speaker engages Anielewicz directly, informing him in “The Trail Goes Cold” that “there’s nothing, no messages or words,” and reaching an epiphany in “Open,” of what has moved this collection into existence: “it must have been love, Lieutenant.” Leaving with no ultimate “message,” only an affirmation of love, underlines a deeper wisdom of To the Letter—its processes of connective listening, imagination, and creation.
Throughout this collection of shifting perspectives, multiple thematic threads, and interplay between the social, cultural, and personal, one must continually meet Różycki’s challenge to read across the gaps between poems. In this process, we are encouraged to cultivate an interconnectedness of perception, feeling, and thought. It is a psychological practice against solipsism, and a defiance of authoritarianism. To the Letter reminds us that fragmentation offers an opportunity to listen and create, that the blank spaces between words are places in which new life may yet be lived. It reminds us that the reader is doubly alive, watching and being watched, even from the shadows. We see a poet passing through the gates, and he is seeing us too.
Michael Collins’ poems and book reviews have appeared in many journals and magazines. He is also the author of several books and chapbooks, including Appearances, which was named one of the best indie poetry collections of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews. He teaches at New York University and various community outreach and children’s centers. He is the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, NY. Visit notthatmichaelcollins.com.
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