Oho: Selected Poetry and Prose

Miron Bialoszewski, one of the most innovative writers in post World War II Polish literature, wrote poetry, plays, and autobiographical prose. He had difficulties accepting the norms of socialist realism and spent most of his early career in destitution as a dissident. His first volume of poems, The Revolution of Things, appeared in 1956. Deliberately provocative in its use of grotesque imagery, it had a considerable impact. His next book, Erroneous Emotions (1961), was radically antipoetic in its choice and use of words and sounds.

Bialoszewski published two more collections of poetry in addition to plays and several books of prose, one of which, A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising (1970), describes the horrors of the ill-fated battle seen through the eyes of the nonheroic civilians. Though an experimenter, Bialoszewski contributed to Polish literature primarily by stressing everyday reality in both the material world and human interrelations.

Bialoszewski died in 1984.

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