ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some of the closing thoughts of the preceding chapters of this book. The book demonstrates that Tadeusz Borowski's love poems set in Auschwitz are forms of testimony-despite their elision of meta-testimonial facts-just as his journalistic pieces more obviously are, written after his release into Munich. In Delbo's own terms, testimony might be 'true' in the sense that it draws on historical events, but it might not be 'truthful' in that it records accurately the subject's every sensation. The book engages with 'non-professional' testimony-as in the chapters on the Oasis poets and Voices-but it primarily draws attention to examples of autonomous, testimonial art, such as Borowski's 'October Sky', Owen's verse, Geoff rey O'Brien's 9/11 poems, and Delbo's trilogy. Poetry as testimony stands firm against, but not does not completely alienate, the reader; it does, however, oppose any conception of testimony as a mimetic vehicle for the transmission of experience unproblematically into the public sphere.
