Pisanki E-Book

Zosia Kuczyńska

• Herausgeber: The Emma Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: The Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 24

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

In 1940, a young girl is taken from her home in Eastern Poland to Arkhangelsk, Siberia; in 1942, she boards a train. Seventy years later, that journey is reimagined by her granddaughter, Zosia Kuczyńska. As Kuczyńska's poems tell the story of her babcia, her maternal grandmother, coming to England, she confronts some of the big questions of art and history: how do you tell another person's story without exploiting it? What's at stake when we try make patterns out of the past, and can we ever leave those patterns behind? Kuczyńska's poems are both richly narrative and sharply attentive to the complexities of home and culture. They capture human endurance through the redrawing of political maps, from 'the heat of Easter in Tehran' to the powdered eggs and stocking shortages of the London Blitz.

Leseprobe

Pisanki (Easter Eggs)

Only to scratch the surface has its own integrity;

besides, a pattern is easier to comprehend than eggshells.

THE EMMA PRESS

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i.m. Maria Juralewicz (z domu Sztela)

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THEEMMAPRESS

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by the Emma Press Ltd

Poems copyright © Zosia Kuczyńska 2017

Introduction copyright © Bernard O’Donoghue 2017

All rights reserved.

The right of Zosia Kuczyńska to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN 978-1-910139-72-1

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in Great Britain

by Charlesworth Press, Wakefield.

The Emma Press

theemmapress.com

[email protected]

Birmingham, UK

Introduction

The backstory to Zosia Kuczyńska’s haunting poems in Pisanki is a remarkable one: the removal of over 2000 Polish children to Maharashtra in India in 1942, after they and their families were deported to Siberia following the Soviet attack on Poland in 1939. Zosia Kuczyńska’s grandmother, Maria Juralewicz (neé Sztela), was one of those redeemed children, and these poems draw on her recorded memories of that extraordinary experience as the displaced children travelled first from Russia to Persia, then to Karachi and on to Valivade. In 1948 Maria came to England with her sister and brother. This extraordinary odyssey is the context for Pisanki, which is dedicated to the memory of Maria Juralewicz.

But the odyssey is only the material of these remarkable poems; Kuczyńska weaves a wonderful tapestry of lyric poems out of it. Near the beginning of the collection, ‘Fellow Traveller 2’ is named after Sputnik 2, the first spacecraft to carry a living animal into orbit. At the other end of the book, ‘Vespertiliones’ draws on the story in Book 4 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses