Zero Visibility

This collection of poems from one of Poland’s most unique contemporary writers, Grzegorz Wróblewski, demonstrates his characteristic virtues: an objectivist stance, anthropological focus, and epigrammatic concision. However, new elements are beginning to assert themselves as well. Wróblewski experiments with a more extensive use of found material—the preferred technique of English-language conceptual writers, which here acquires a distinctly Eastern European flavor, as well as with a lyrical candor that teases his 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.