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Spontaneous, colloquial, and anti-conventional verse from a celebrated Polish writer .
Continued is a selection of poems by Piotr Sommer, spanning his career to date. A kind of poetic utterance, these "talk poems" are devoid of any singsong quality yet faithfully preserve all the melodies and rhythms of colloquial speech. Events and objects of ordinary, everyday life are related and described by the speaker in a deliberately deadpan manner. Yet a closer look at the language he uses, with all its ironic inflections and subtle "intermeanings," reveals that the poem's "message" should be identified more with the way it is spoken than with what it says. The poems in this volume were translated into English with the help of other notable poets, writers, and translators, including John Ashbery, D.J. Enright, and Douglas Dunn.
Acknoledgments
Foreword - August Kleinzahler
From Shepherd's Song / Piosenka pasterska (1999)
Morning on Earth
Yesterday
Visibility
Municipal Services
Continued
i.m. Milton Hindus
Short Version
Tomorrow
Shepherd' Song
From elsewhere
Sometimes, Yes
From Lyric Factor and Other Poems / Czynnik liryczny i inne wiersze (1988)
Indiscretions
Candle
Amnesia
Station Lights
Landscape with Branch
Transparencies
Innocence
Believe me
Home and Night
Guesswork
Days of the Week
Travel Permit, Round Trip
Leaves and Comes Back
Medicine
According to Brecht
A Certain Tree in Powazki Cemetery
Fragile
Don't Sleep, Take Notes
Third State
Liberation, in Language
Landscape with the Wind
Worldliness
Neolith
Talkativeness
Grammar
Ah, Continuity
Lighter, Darker
Proofs
Apoliticial Poem
Ode to the Carnival
Don't Worry, It Won't Get Lost
Receding Planets of the Rowan Tree
Out of Town
Prospects in Prose
A Small Treatise on Non-Contradiction
A Maple Leaf
From elsewhere
Little Graves
From A Subsequent Word
PIOTR SOMMER is a poet and translator of English, Irish, and American poetry. He is the author of eight books of poetry, including one in English, Things to Translate (1991), and two books of essays. Sommer lives outside Warsaw and works for a magazine of international writing. AUGUST KLEINZAHLER is a widely-published poet whose most recent book is The Strange Hours Travelers Keep (2003).
"If you admire the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz and especially Wislawa Szymborska, seek out Piotr Sommer. Based on Continued, ...Sommer deserves a place alongside these philosophically alert Polish poets."
~John Taylor, Antioch Review
"It might come as a shock to you, but the real father of Polish poetry written in the last 20 years is Piotr Sommer. Look at his clarity, his gentle light as immediately after rain, his landscapes and touches, his fascinating human scale—and find out why."
~Tomaz Salamun, author of Feast
"Piotr Sommer is the great poet of 'everyday loneliness, contrary to your self, perhaps.' Like Frank O'Hara, whom he has translated into Polish, he is on the lookout for what he calls improper names—the very ones that allow us to construe the unkempt and taciturn world that surrounds us."
~John Ashbery