Poetic micro-stories of Urszula Honek

Abstract

The article is an attempt to describe the poetic work of Urszula Honek and to indicate the most important motifs in it. The author argues that the power of this poetry lies in the combination of an original, dark, and disturbing vision of the world with an economical and piercingly precise language. Based on four published volumes of poems, he analyses the story contained in them about human existence, permanently rooted in nature, connected with folk culture, subject to the ruthless laws of biology, sensitive to atavisms and instincts. At the same time, it is a vision closely related to the motif of death and the constant threat of all manifestations of evil. The author emphasises that Urszula Honek is a poet of narrative, telling individual human micro-stories, most often difficult, dramatic, related to the experience of evil, violence, helplessness. The originality of the language and imagination of Urszula Honek's poems allows us to state that they are among the most interesting phenomena in Polish poetry of the last decade.