The austerity of Marzanna Kielar's mindscape compels with its
monochromy. Her poems insistently return to northern Poland cataloguing
the sea, fog, wind, lakes, rivers, woods, fields, and crows. "My first
homeland is a post-German landscape," she acknowledges, "with wild rose
bushes, stone stables, metal window fittings, red roofs."
Kielar does not comment on Poland's past or present. Like so many other
young Polish poets who started to publish after 1989, she no longer
needs to: confronting history and the state has finally become an
aesthetic choice rather than a poet's moral obligation. When Kielar
speaks about her obligation as a poet, she speaks about bringing home
what we tend to call reality, love, death. Always aware of the risk
involved in naming, she strives to bring out of darkness words and their
meanings.
Marzanna Bogumila Kielar (b.1963, Goldap), a graduate in philosophy
from Warsaw University, works at the College of Special Needs Education
in Warsaw and co-operates with the literary magazine Krasnogruda. She
has published two collections of poetry and has received the Kazimiera
Illakowiczówna Prize for the best debut of the year, and the Koscielski
Foundation Prize; she has been nominated for the NIKE Prize.
Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese teaches translation and contemporary
literature in English at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She
co-edits Przekladaniec, a journal of literary translation; her
translations of contemporary Polish poets have appeared in numerous
journals, and the Zephyr anthology Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird.
