This article explores the themes and imagery of ill health in Małgorzata Lebda’s poetry. In the poetic triptych Sprawy ziemi [ Matters of the Earth] (2020) she keeps return-ing to the experience of illness and grieves for the loss of both parents (first her mother, then her father) and a missing sister, whose memory was blotted out from family history. In fact, though, Granica lasu [ The Forest Border] (2013) and Matecznik [ Wildwood] (2016) can be seen as earlier attempts to come to terms with all those traumas by transforming them into the texture of her poems. Similarly, the mysterious elder sister who has haunted the poets’ dreams is conjured up in the Sny uckermärkerów [ The Uckermärkers’ Dreams] (2019). The final part of the triptych makes is clear that both sisters bear an in-delible mark of illness, which, in one way or another, is omnipresent in Lebda’s poetic world. It is a tough world where illness and death spares no man, animal or plant.

This article is an attempt to describe and classify an array of contemporary texts about the death of a parent. Rather than drawing on the methodology and conceptual appara-tus developed on the basis of psychoanalysis this study makes use of the anthropological approach, which, it is assumed, can do full justice to the specific nature of the texts and the motivation declared by their authors. The first part of the article contains a catalogue of selected bereavement texts published in Poland in the last twenty years, arranged in a hierarchical order indicative of their canonical significance. The justification, metho-dology and criteria of that arrangement are discussed in the following section. The third part presents a typology of the collected material. The classification takes into account the following characteristics: subject, commonplaces and recurring themes, narration, intertextual relations, and style. Generally, the classificatory scheme reveals two narra-tive matrices (as defined by Vinciane Despret). They are the ‘inbred’ (i.e. traditional, or high) matrix, and the alternative (i.e. low or eclectic matrix). A comparative analysis of the texts about loss and grief caused by the death of a parent suggests that the division and the choice of discourse is determined by the ideological and political interpretation of the child-parent relationship functioning in the culture, which, in turn, is conditioned by the social role, status and gender of the writer. The writing utensils from the title, the fountain pen and the BIC pen (ball pen) in a way emblematize the two narrative matrices and offer a clue to the writer’s gender.