Two thirds poems, one third diary-like prose fragments. The poems are probably best read after Gregorszewska's semi-autobiographical 2017 novella Swallowing Mercury (which was longlisted for the 2017 Booker Intternational Prize. They also focus on her family - spanning the 20th century - and her time growing up in 1980s rural Silesia, with some aspects of everyday technology comparable to the early 20th century in Britain. They have the same enchanting Bruno Schulz-like magic in which eccentricities and sweetness are amplified to create memorable characters. Knowing more about these people's life stories from elaborations in the prose book augments understanding of and connection to the poems, and there are many cross references both to scenes - hunting for scrap metal with teenage classmates, her ageing father feeding bees, making feather bedding - and motifs - especially sweet flags and iris, as well as more generally Polish elements like mushroom-picking, and a great many names of plants. (Plenty to look up here, especially botanical - and fascinating oddments like a bombilla, an early reusable straw.) Again the narrative voice carries a sense of self-assurance, and features like the narrator's relationship with her father, outdoor escapades and an unspoken disregard of the patriarchal culture of the time that makes many pieces seem as if they could have just as easily been by a male writer. A few poems, for which the later book provides no background, felt more opaque in their details, although with equal potential for loveliness if I'd known more. At least one references an earlier bilingual poetry collection Pamięć Smieny / Smena's Memory, which I have not read. For those who need to know about such things, there are none of the brief sexual assault scenes from the novella, although the poems do mention, often in moving tones, some of her relatives' tough experiences during the World Wars.
Crowds rushing the bridge, the boy barely seven
out of breath and running, forced to abandon
his basket of hatchlings…
Before the bombardment
twists the steel bridge into rings of wild fire,
bodies cast like feathers up into flaming air,
you will dive into the water and find breath recovered
in the silt, the sweet flag
and the shore of your bed.
---
One more winter will do me in, he thought,
but he lived on to sing in taverns
his forbidden songs and build his bread ovens.
Nights are his borderlands. Bushes glowing
with the tracking eyes of German shepherds.
The trigger fingers of branches heavy with dew.
----
Her grandmother is folkloric:
Wheat daughter, prisoner of sneaky pigweed, mother
to the five corners of the world and your three hectares,
beak-nosed carpenter’s wife and the potter’s lover,
queen of the aroma of grey soap, head covered
with a gold-trimmed kerchief, the glory of birds at dawn,
tired liege of furrowed fields, midwife to our breads,
magic purveyor of spirit and rye, protector of cabbages,
you who brought ripe Augusts deep into the barn,
warrior woman feared and hated by all local cats,
nurse of the sour leaven in our stone house,
But occasionally, this could only be the 1980s, and a teenage girl:
At night, the Chernobyl cloud fell
across pastures. Thyroids swelled.
The pond glowed with murmuring iodine,
swallows kissing crooked mirrors.
The radio kept playing “Moonlight Shadow”.
In the barn, a girl guide from the city started
a club for virgins. Smoking menthols…
One signposts towards the contemporary immigrant tales to come:
Sleep, for tomorrow you’ll watch Polish satellite TV,
a carton of smuggled fags waiting on your doorstep.
A fairy godmother will also reload your gas meter,
help you find refuge under a warm power-shower.
Sleep! A Breezer trickle runs along the floor.
Tobacco folding into the shape of fern leaves.
Your dreams will be done. You will go home.
Sleep! You’ll stop drinking, abandon the farm
where stalks cut your hard-working hands
and tea time is blessed respite.
Sleep! Night time here, in this promised land, is shorter.
The alarm clock squealing at five in the morning.
The shivering bicycle waiting by the gate.
Off mushroom picking with granddad?
The fragments (can't be sure if they are fully or only partly autobiographical) relate first-person experiences as a Polish immigrant living on the Isle of Wight from 2006-2014, often on a low income. I have never been to the Isle of Wight, nor taken much interest in the place, so in some ways it was more novel than hearing about Poland - but overall less inviting.
They present a major shift in tone, like visiting someone whom you're used to seeing dressed up away from home, and now they are in a bathrobe - but they remain the same interesting person, and each style has its plus points.
My two year old daughter is sitting in the corner of the garden and whispers to a spider, “Don’t be afraid. Don’t be.”
--
I attend English lessons, along with other migrant mothers and their small children. They help us feel more at home in the Islanders’ tongue. One session features John Keats and his poetry. The son of one of the students, evidently bored, writhing in his chair, starts to throw scraps of paper on the floor. His mother, irate, explodes in Polish:
“Put those down, or you’ll grow up to be another poet!”
--
Ten calls since morning about work, and every time I have to spell my name over and over again, letter by tiny letter. With each call, the sound of it becoming ever-more alien to me. Outside the kitchen window, the orange flash of a Royal Mail postman’s jacket flies by. An envelope! I run to the door, hoping it’s news of a job offer, an invite for interview or at least a decision about benefits. I tear it open and out pops a poetry chapbook.
---
I wished this one had been expanded into a full essay, as there's so little English commentary on contemporary Polish literature beyond individual authors:
Polish poetry is starting to make me feel queasy. I hide from it in the prose by Hlasko, Caldwell, Zweig, Dowlatow, Flaubert, Pilch, Kafka. I have had years of reading poetry volumes from Zielona Sowa, Biuro Literackie, anthologies, offerings from the “barbarians” and the “classicists”, niche genres, publications bought in bookshops, blogs, pre- and post-Brulion poets, internet art-zines, reams of verses, e-books, PDFs. I am infected with Polish poetry. I have had my fill of the stuff, chasing files from my inbox onto my desktop or into the trash.
There are other references to other Polish writers and artists almost unknown in English: Halina Poświatowska, Zygmunt Haupt, Ildefons Houwalt - which I gather up and note here for my own reference rather than to give the impression the book is wall-to-wall with this stuff, which it really isn't. Most of it is about daily life and personal events.
I have reservations about this translation, as it might be too anglicised. (I'd love to hear more about the Polish about it from someone who's fluent in both.) One of the poems, about playing in the snow as a child, refers to "moon boots". Did she really have those? The Polish poem contains no references to moon boots, walking as if on the moon or similar. The locals are always "Islanders" never "the English" as the Polish would sometimes translate and which would give a stronger sense of otherness.
(read and reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
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