Tadeusz Rozewicz

[Purple]

Born in Radomsko in 1921, he studied art history at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, but has been associated with Silesia since the late 1940s and has lived in Wroclaw for thirty years. A poet, playwright and novelist, he is the most versatile, and perhaps the pre-eminent living writer in the world today.

His work has been translated into foreign languages including English, French, German, Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, Swedish, Danish and Finnish and has received Polish state prizes and foreign awards. He is renowned in many countries, and above all in the Balkans, as an example of an excellent poet of the highest moral authority. Rozewicz is a precursor of the avant-garde in poetry and drama, an innovator firmly rooted in the unceasing re-creation of the Romantic tradition, and an independent artist who, despite the pressure of public opinion, has steered clear of politics. He is a grand solitary, convinced of an artistic mission that he regards as a state of internal concentration, interior alertness, and ethical sensitivity.

Draft For A Contemporary Love Poem

For surely whiteness
is best described through greyness
bird through stone
sunflowers
in December

in the past love poems
described flesh
described this and that
eyelashes for instance

surely redness
should be described
through greyness sun through rain
poppies in November
lips at night

the most telling
description of bread
is one of hunger
it includes
the damp porous centre
the warm interior
sunflowers at night
breasts belly thighs of Cybele

a spring-like
transparent description
of water
is the description of thirst
of ashes
desert
it conjures up a mirage
cloudas and trees enter
the mirror

Hunger deprivation
absence of flesh
is the description of love
the contemporary love poem