Nożyk profesora

A slim book of six poems, held together by a long title poem begun in 1950 and dedicated to the art historian Mieczysław Porębski, who as a prisoner in Auschwitz fashioned a small knife from a barrel hoop; the knife itself appears on the cover. In six sections, among them Trains, Shadows and The Last Century, the poem stitches together fragments: a cemetery visit and the funeral of a fellow poet's wife, goods wagons and cattle trucks carrying banal fear and despair, weeping holy pictures after the war, old women still crying, a breakfast between two old friends. The lines are short, bare and unpunctuated. The book also finds room for rain in Kraków and a "golden train", and reproduces the poet's drafts with their crossings-out.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Poetry

Length

40 pages in the original

Genres

War (assigned by AI)

First published

2001 by Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie

Author's age

80 when first published

ISBN

9788370238407 (original)