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Tadeusz Ró'ewicz, New Poems (Archipelago, 2007)

I cut my poetic teeth on the surrealists and the dadas, and ever since I first discovered the genius of poets like Desnos and Daumal, I've been searching for modern inheritors of their craft. Of those poets known as surrealists these days (no one uses the term "dada" any more, however accurate it may be to describe a given poet's work), I have found very few that really assimilated not only the style, but the substance of surrealism--Chris Stroffolino, the early work of Clayton Eshleman, a handful of others. Oddly, all of them have been American, despite the fact that surrealism was born in Europe and then migrated to other parts of the world, but during its tenure never really caught on here; all the great American surrealists were American expatriates. Imagine my delight, then, when I started reading this newest volume of Ró'ewicz' and came across this tidbit from the first poem in the book, "the professor's knife":

"don't you have a watch or clock or something

a timepiece I mean we're entering

the 21st century there are supermarkets internets

there are egg timers

or whatever they're called

in modern households

in Germany"

That could be straight out of any surrealist tome, were any of the originals still alive and writing today. Awesome.

It's not all that wonderful; the one piece of the surrealist puzzle Ró'ewicz never quite masters is the complete assimilation of the political, so that it seems an organic piece of the poetic puzzle. Too often the flow stops for a political insert, though not always; there are times when he completely gets it, and those times are some of the best poems in the book (including "the professor's knife", a 20-plus page poem that seems to pull in every facet of Polish life at the end of the twentieth century). But if you cotton to the frenetic pace of the poems and that wonderful surrealist absence of punctuation that drives it, this is great stuff, and I highly recommend getting to know it. ****