Review: Nothing More, by Krystyna Miłobędzka
Tadeusz Nyczek
What distinguishes Miłobędzka's poetry? Let's turn to anatomy for a comparison. Whereas 'rhetorical' poets are interested in human body moved by the will of the brain, and 'introvert-searching' poets are curious about internal organs: the heart and the blood circulation system, Miłobędzka peers into the microscopic network of neural synapses, hidden stimuli, invisible links that connect everything with everything. What forces us to stroke a cat, and what makes us wonder in amazement about the similarity between the rustle of a birch and the rustle of blood.
Describing Miłobędzka as 'cosmic' may, in light of the above comparison, sound absurd. And yet. The microcosmos of her poems transforms without any difficulty into the macrocosmos, when we realize what territories it embraces. If these poems reveal similarity (kinship, the poet herself would say) between the light in the window and the rocking of the cradle, between the shape of the horse and the shape of the apple-tree, between the cage and the woods, that is, between anything and anything, even between a participle and a ribbon in the hair, then we deal not only with a vast imagination which is purely poetic (surrealists, too, knew how to associate everything with everything), but with a certain vision, or rather a spiritual and sensual perception, of the world as a cosmic unity in multitude.
Miłobędzka seems at times to understand other voices besides our human voice, which she herself uses whenever she speaks and writes. If I'm one with the universe, it's not only me who speaks, but also I am spoken through. I'm both a message sender and a medium through which it is sent. We may suspect that Miłobędzka can hear more, that she readily serves as an interpreter between various inhabitants of the same nature.