Hailed by Czeslaw Milosz as โthe grande dame of Polish poetryโ and named โone of the foremost Polish poets of the twentieth centuryโ by Ryszard Kapuscinski, Julia Hartwig has long been considered the gold standard of poetry in her native Poland. With this career-spanning collection, we finally have a book of her work in English.
The tragic story of the last century flows naturally through Hartwigโs poems. She evokes the husbands who returned silent from battle (โWhat woman was told about the hell at Monte Cassino?โ) and asks, โWhy didnโt I dance on the Champs-รlysรฉes / when the crowd cheered the end of the war? . . . Why was I fated to be on the main street of Lublin / watching regiments with red stars enter the city.โ But there is also a welcoming of new experience in her verse, a sense that life, finally, is too beautiful to condemn. She seeks a higher peace, urging us to hear other voices: โan ermineโs cry, moan of a dove, / complaint of an owlโthat remind us / the hardship of solitude is measured out equally.โ
Hartwigโs compassionate spirit in the face of destruction and suffering, her apparent need to live in the moment, make her poems monumental and deeply touching and the introduction of her work here long overdue.
Return to My Childhood Home
Amid a dark silence of pinesโthe shouts of
young birches calling each other.
Everything is as it was. Nothing is as it was.
Speak to me, Lord of the child. Speak,
innocent terror!
To understand nothing. Each time in a different
way, from the first cry to the last breath.
Yet happy moments come to me from the past,
like bridesmaids carrying oil lamps.