Poems about my Psychiatrist

<p class=ql-align-justify>'The world's really not the way it is' says the eponymous Psychiatrist in Andrzej Kota��ski's wildly popular <em>Poems about my Psychiatrist '</em>it's not what it seems to us to be / to tell the truth / the world doesn't actually exist.' This is problematical to say the least. The world doesn't exist? Well here I am and here is this book real paper which I hold in my real hands. If you're confused don't expect much help to come from the book itself. Do we have two narrators here or one? Is there a patient and a psychiatrist in conversation or is the psychiatrist merely a projection of the patient's own mind a cry for help incarnate from a person unable to deal with life?</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>As ambiguity is at the heart of great literature this is not a bad thing: it gives us as readers something to argue about an elusive answer to chase down over successive ever closer readings of a book made up of deceptively straightforward lucid verses. The bigger problem is the staggering popularity of <em>Poems about my Psychiatrist</em> recently reprinted in an anniversary edition that contains new poems added to the original cycle. Kota��ski's work is a bestseller in Poland - a status of which few if any collections of poetry may boast. To what does it owe its popularity? Kota��ski's incisive bare-bones approach to poetry which savours of the best compositions of Tadeusz R����ewicz and Zbigniew Herbert presents to us an unnamed anti-hero.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>Unlike R����ewicz's disillusioned soldier returning from the war and Herbert's <em>Pan Cogito</em> - that indefatigable defender of Mediterranean culture and human dignity in the face of totalitarianism - Kota��ski's anti-hero is a neurotic sort a jumble of complexes who can be best compared to the twitchy protagonists of Woody Allen's films. If we as readers identify with him what does this say about ourselves and our culture now in the third decade of the twenty-first century? Here reader in the English translation of Charles S. Kraszewski we present you with a mirror. Open your eyes if you dare.</p><p><br></p>