Anna Kamieńska*

Anna Kamieńska (1920—1986) is a Polish poet, translator, writer, and literary critic. Her earliest poems were published when she was just 14 in the Warsaw children’s magazine Płomyczek. During the Nazi occupation she taught in underground village schools. Later she became involved in Warsaw’s literary life, including as a book reviewer for the prestigious monthly magazine Creativity.

She has been described in Polish American Journal as “a major Polish writer, and equal to Nobel Prize winners Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz, [who] grew up in the horrors of Nazi occupation and Communism. She wrote 20 collections of poetry. It was after the death of her husband — the poet Jan Śpiewak when she was just 47 — that she embarked on a journey from unbelief through metaphysical wrestlings to faith. This journey may be observed both through her poetry collections, and her two-volume Notebooks.

The following poem is from Astonishments: Selected poems of Anna Kamieńska (Paraclete, 2007) and was translated from Polish by Grażyna Drabik and David Carson.

The Lamp

I write in order to comprehend not to express myself
I don’t grasp anything I’m not ashamed to admit it
sharing this not knowing with a maple leaf
So I turn with questions to words wiser than myself
to things that will endure long after us
I wait to gain wisdom from chance
I expect sense from silence
Perhaps something will suddenly happen
and pulse with hidden truth
like the spirit of the flame in the oil lamp
under which we bowed our heads
when we were very young
and grandmas crossed the bread with a knife
and we believed in everything
So now I yearn for nothing so much
as for that faith

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Anna Kamieńska: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Adam Zagajewski

Adam Zagajewski is a Polish poet, essayist and translator. He divides his time between Krakow and Chicago, where he teaches at the University of Chicago. His awards include the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award.

His poem "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" appeared on the back cover of The New Yorker shortly after the September 11th attacks, and received a lot of attention. His books include Without End: New and Selected Poems (FSG, 2003) and most-recently, Unseen Hand (FSG, 2011).

In acknowledgement of Czeslaw Milosz's question of the Pope, "[H]ow in the 20th century can one write religious poetry differently?” Zagajewski has said, “I think poets have to be able to find fresh metaphors for old metaphysical objects and longings. I’m a Christian, a sometimes doubting one (but this is almost a definition of a Christian: to doubt also). In my writing I have to be radically different from a priest. My language must have the sheen of a certain discovery.”

The following poem is from Without End.

Presence

I was born in a city of wild cherries
and hard-seeded sunflowers (common wisdom
had it halfway from the West
to the East). Globes stained by verdigris
kept careless vigil.

Might only the absence of presence be perfect?
Presence, after all, infected with the original
sin of existence, is excessive, savage,
Oriental, superb, while beauty, like a fruit knife,
snips its bit of plenitude off.
Life accumulates through generations
as in a pond; it does not vanish
with its moment but turns
airy and dry. I think
of a half-conscious prayer, the chapped lips
of a boy at his first confession,
the wooden step creaking
under his knees.
At night, autumn arrives
for the harvest, yellow, ripe for flame.
There are, I know, not one
but at least four realities,
intersecting
like the Gospels.
I know I'm alone, but linked
firmly to you, painfully, gladly.
I know only the mysteries are immortal.

Thanks to Burl Horniachek for suggesting this, and many other poets.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Adam Zagajewski: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

Czeslaw Milosz*

Czeslaw Milosz (1911—2004) is a Polish poet who during WWII participated in the underground resistance in Warsaw against both the Nazis and the Soviets, writing and editing books. His faith was severely challenged in the face of all the horrors he witnessed, and yet remained strong. Once he'd escaped from the oppressive communist regime that gripped his homeland, he lived in the United States from 1960 until his death; he continued to write in Polish, and then participated in its translation into English. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980.

Joseph Brodsky wrote, "I have no hesitation whatsoever in stating that Czeslaw Milosz is one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest." The following poem is from Second Space — the last book he published before his death.

Hear Me

Hear me, Lord, for I am a sinner, which means I have nothing except
prayer.

Protect me from the day of dryness and impotence.

When neither a swallow’s flight nor peonies, daffodils and irises
in the flower market are a sign of Your glory.

When I will be surrounded by scoffers and unable, against their
arguments, to remember any miracle of Yours.

When I will seem to myself an impostor and swindler because I take
part in religious rites.

When I will accuse You of establishing the universal law of death.

When I am ready at last to bow down to nothingness and call life
on earth a devil’s vaudeville.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Czeslaw Milosz: first post

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) is a Russian poet who early faced the displeasure of the Soviet government. He was discriminated against for his Jewish background, and when he was just 23 years old was arrested and tried for “parasitism”. This brought him to the attention of the West. Many campaigned for his release until he was eventually expelled from his home country. W.H. Auden was among those who helped him to settle in the United States, where he became poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan, in 1973.

While still in Russia, Brodsky had learned Polish and English so that he could translate such poets as Czeslaw Milosz, and John Donne. Even after having come to the U.S. he wrote his poetry in Russian, and then often translated it into English. In 1987 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 1991 he became poet laureate of the United States.

From 1962 to 1993 Joseph Brodsky wrote a Christmas poem virtually every year. These poems have been collected in his book Nativity Poems. Brodsky called himself a “Christian by correspondence”, since he often felt insecure in his faith; even so, within his verse he acknowledges deep truths.

Christmas Star

In a cold time, in a place more accustomed
To scorching heat, to flat plains than to hills,
A child was born in a cave to save the world.
And it stormed, as only winter’s desert can.

Everything seemed huge to him: his mother’s breast
The yellow steam of the camels’ breath, the Magi,
Balthazar, Caspar, Melchior, their gifts, carried here.
He was all of him just a dot. And the dot was a star.

Attentively and fixedly, through the sparse white clouds
Upon the recumbent child, on the manger, from afar,
From the depths of the universe, from its very end,
A star watched over the cave. And that was the father’s gaze.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Joseph Brodsky: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Anna Kamieńska

Anna Kamieńska (1920–1986), like Czeslaw Milosz, lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland, and the difficult years under communism. Her poetry doesn’t describe the inhumanity of those times, but concentrates on essential, lasting things. Her husband — the poet Jan Śpiewak — died prematurely of cancer in 1967, and left Kamieńska in search of answers. In 1970 she wrote in her notebook, “I was looking for the dead, and I found God.”

During the 1970s the Polish government tried to silence her, and suppress her work, because they saw her as part of the democratic movement. Even so, she has written twenty books of poetry, and many biblical commentaries. In 2007 Paraclete Press released a collection of her poems, translated into English by Grażyna Drabik and David Curson, called Astonishments. This book demonstrates her hard-earned faith, nurtured through honest questioning and doubt, as exemplified in the following poems.

A Prayer

Out of a spark and out of dust make me again
again plant trees in my paradise
once more give me the sky over my head

So I could deny You with my reason
call you forth with all my tears
find You like love with my lips

Lack Of Faith

Yes
even when I don’t believe
there is a place in me
inaccessible to unbelief
a patch of wild grace
a stubborn preserve
impenetrable
pain untouched sleeping in the body
music that builds its nest in silence

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Anna Kamieńska: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Betsy Sholl

Betsy Sholl was appointed Poet Laureate of Maine in 2006; her term ends this year. She teaches at, both, the University of Southern Maine, and Vermont College of Fine Arts — and has won several awards for her poetry.

Luci Shaw said in Radix, “A kind of fierce honesty pierces much of Sholl’s writing, revealing her proclivity for examining her own heart through the lens of the events and objects she discovers.” This is well-demonstrated in the poem included below, which is the final poem from her seventh collection: Rough Cradle (Alice James Books, 2009).

The journal Image records her words about her approach to writing poetry,
--------“...what starts a poem is usually the experience of paradox or
--------contradiction, two equally true perceptions or emotions
--------co-existing: beauty and pain, love and fear, life and decay.
--------I love Auden’s comment that poetry is the clear expression of
--------mixed emotions, and Czeslaw Milosz’s notion about poetry as
--------a ‘passionate pursuit of the real.’ Of course “the real” eludes
--------us, but the pursuit enlarges us and keeps us aware of the
--------ultimate reality, God.”

Life and Holiness

I couldn’t finish the book because the end
no longer existed, the final words on life
and holiness, that old coin with its two sides
impossible to see at once, so each face
makes you long for the other—unless, of course,
the coin’s been rubbed down, almost out,
as my book was, not dog-eared, but dog-chewed,
a big chunk torn off its lower right,
and the whole book ending coverless
on page 118, so it’s hard to read
the thoughts without thinking of their fate,
and the message bound to what carries it:
Life and Holiness by Thomas Merton,
bound to our dog named Dreug, Russian for friend,
who also ate the edge of my purple dress
as I sat talking on the couch, plus a wooden apple,
and every chair rung in the house. It’s hard
not to think of the monk being chewed on
by silence, gnawed down, past ritual and custom,
to a desert of naked prayer, a dark night
where nothing’s left but the self’s empty shell,
the soul cracked open for something else to rush in,
which the words were just getting to
when Dreug, that zealous friend, aching and driven,
turned the matter into slobber and wag,
his new teeth editing, so the book
ends with:
-------------------------------------------...For such... (crunch)
---...lovers of God, all things, whether they appear...
-----------...in actuality good. All things manifest the...
---------------------...All things enable them to grow in...

Here it stops, the promise digested,
our big brown dog a better reader than I,
licking his lips, swallowing the words, taking in
the such and all things, however they appear.
And were they, in actuality good?
Was the back cover, the spine glue, the wood
or rage pulp of each missing page? “Complete
and unabridged,” it says just where the teeth marks
bite, where the paper’s rough edge, its newly exposed
microscopic threads meet air and morning light,
as if words could turn into life, into window glass
with bickering sparrows, children walking
to school, as Dreug, with his spotted face,
his feathery toes, watches all things
manifest the— enable them to grow in—
As to holiness, you lovers of God, must all things
come to an edge where words stop, and hunger—
that faithful friend who eats away what once
would have been so easy to read—begins?

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 to a Catholic family in County Derry — in predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland; since 1972 he has lived in the Republic of Ireland. He has received many honours as a poet — serving as the Professor of Poetry at both Harvard and Oxford, and having received the Nobel Prize in 1995. He is also celebrated for his Whitbread Award-winning translation of Beowulf.

His poetry usually dwells in a rural landscape, where his faith is more taken as a given, than discussed as a topic. He tends to not reveal himself or make declarations, but sets images up for observation. Biblical references, including miracles, are portrayed as history.

In a poem, dedicated to the memory of fellow–Catholic poet Czeslaw Milosz, called “Out of This World” — from Heaney’s 2006 collection District and Circle — he gives us a deeper glimpse: “I went to the alter rails and received the mystery / on my tongue, returned to my place, shut my eyes fast, made / an act of thanksgiving, opened my eyes and felt / time starting up again.” In this image of faith, he says of the consecration that he “believed (whatever it means) that a change had occurred”. Is he saying he believed without understanding — or that he’s questioning what belief means, or what the change means? Since it’s “a change” is he acknowledging or questioning the Catholic idea of transubstantiation?

Similarly below, in this earlier poem, Heaney seems to be criticizing the long-held Catholic belief in limbo — and by extension the Catholic doctrine that salvation is only possible for those who have been baptised. These questions are raised in his poetry, but Heaney seems to leave us to our own conclusions.

Limbo

Fishermen at Ballyshannon
Netted an infant last night
Along with the salmon.
An illegitimate spawning,

A small one thrown back
To the waters. But I'm sure
As she stood in the shallows
Ducking him tenderly

Till the frozen knobs of her wrists
Were dead as the gravel,
He was a minnow with hooks
Tearing her open.

She waded in under
The sign of the cross.
He was hauled in with the fish.
Now limbo will be

A cold glitter of souls
Through some far briny zone.
Even Christ's palms, unhealed,
Smart and cannot fish there.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Seamus Heaney: second post, third post, fourth post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Czeslaw Milosz

Czeslaw Milosz (1911—2004) was born in Lithuania, he lived in occupied Warsaw during WWII, and witnessed the oppression imposed by both Nazis and Stalinists upon his people. For more than 35 years he taught at the University of California at Berkeley, and in 1980 he received the Nobel Prize for literature.

Czeslaw Milosz wrote in Polish — including his own translation of the Psalms. The poem below was translated into English by the author and Robert Hass. He was as ready to talk about his faith as his doubt, and he was dedicated to and critical of both Poland and traditional Catholic faith.

The following is a selection from a sequence entitled “Treatise On Theology”. In the prose-like section that precedes this one, Milosz says, “Whoever places his trust in Jesus Christ waits for His coming and the end of this world, when the first heaven and the first earth pass, and death is no more.”

Religion Comes

Religion comes from our pity for humans.

They are too weak to live without divine protection.

Too weak to listen to the screeching noise of the turning of infernal wheels.

Who among us would accept a universe in which there was not one voice

Of compassion, pity, understanding?

To be human is to be completely alien amidst the galaxies.

Which is sufficient reason for erecting, together with others, the temples of an unimaginable mercy.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Czeslaw Milosz: second post

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca