The Scent of Man by Tadeusz Dąbrowski

Arrowsmith. 2025. 67 pages.

Tadeusz Dąbrowski (b. 1979) has become one of Poland’s foremost poets, beginning his writing career at the turn of the millennium. His verse manages to convey the gravitas of the postwar “Polish School” poets with the casual deftness of their contemporary successors and has found a sizable international audience.

The Scent of Man is translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, a veritable master of the craft. Here, she manages to make Dąbrowski’s poems sound as if they were composed for us in this language so that no trace of “otherness” remains. Part of this feat may be due to the clarity of Dąbrowski’s own language: even while this poet enjoys playing metatextually with his readers, his writing remains limpid. The volume’s first poem, “Sentence,” creates a masterful allegory of maturation and freedom through the prism of reading and reinterpreting one sentence that may hold the “key to your life.” The poem is not, however, a single sentence, yet several, resembling a prose poem rather than a lyric. Yet its riddlelike content and its form—opening out, then closing onto its initial image—is more lyrical than prosaic.

“Sentence” serves as a keystone to a volume that ponders the themes of self-understanding, the process of writing and of remembrance, and the dichotomy of freedom and constraint. This makes Dabrowski’s work sound more ponderous than it is. These poems are brief lyrics, their density of content seemingly hidden under a smooth surface. Many of them are playfully self-referential, including topics such as the young poet’s narcissism and the trickery of words that have “ears / on the inside,” reflecting each other but also our own hapless selves.

The most delightful feature of Dąbrowski’s writing is its light touch: sometimes witty, sometimes ironic, sometimes nearly flippant in its levity, his tone is key to his achievement. The poems are never frivolous, yet they sometimes tempt us to find them so, even while they manipulate their metaphorical content in utterly serious ways. They are rarely comedic yet more often than not contain a touch of wit, not of the laboriously constructed metaphysical type but a contemporary blink-and-you’ll-miss-it wit that often compels one to look again.

Moral yet not moralistic, informed yet not tediously historical, Dąbrowski is a poet for Poland’s twenty-first century.

Magdalena Kay
University of Victoria