Zero Visibility
This collection of poems from one of Poland's major contemporary writers, Grzegorz Wróblewski, demonstrates his characteristic virtues: anthropological focus, objectivist detachment (though not without hallucinatory interference), minimalistic precision. But it also signals the presence of new elements. One of them is an extensive reliance on found language, the preferred mode of Anglophone conceptual writers, here acquiring a distinctly Eastern European flavor. Another is his candor, which teases readers with glimpses of his most private feelings. Bleak and terse, Wróblewski subjects his material to almost clinical treatment in order to better dissect and so understand the series of events that we call reality.
Grzegorz Wróblewski was born in 1962 in Gdansk and grew up in Warsaw. Since 1985 he has been living in Copenhagen. He is the author of many books of poetry, drama, and other writings. As a visual artist, he has exhibited his paintings in various galleries in Denmark, Germany, England, and Poland. English translations of his work are available in Our Flying Objects (trans. Joel Leonard Katz, Rod Mengham, Malcolm Sinclair, Adam Zdrodowski, Equipage, 2007), A Marzipan Factory (trans. Adam Zdrodowski, Otoliths, 2010), Kopenhaga (trans. Piotr Gwiazda, Zephyr Press, 2013), and Let’s Go Back to the Mainland (trans. Agnieszka Pokojska, Cervená Barva Press, 2014).
Piotr Gwiazda’s translation of Grzegorz Wróblewski’s Kopenhaga appeared from Zephyr Press in 2013. He has also published three books of poetry, Gagarin Street (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2005), Messages (Pond Road Press, 2012), and Aspects of Strangers (Moria Books, 2015), as well as two critical studies, James Merrill and W.H. Auden (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and US Poetry in the Age of Empire, 1979-2012 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). He teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
