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Astonishments: Selected Poems of Anna Kamienska

Astonishments: Selected Poems of Anna Kamienska
By Anna Kamienska

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2007 Paraclete Press hardcover edition.

Product Description

Kamienska came of age during the horrors of the Nazi occupation of Poland and lived under Communism. These experiences, as well as the sudden death of her husband, led her to engagement with the Bible and the great religious thinkers of the 20th century.
 
Her poems record the struggles of a rational mind with religious faith, addressing loneliness and uncertainty in a remarkably direct, unsentimental manner. Her spiritual quest has resulted in extraordinary poems on Job, other biblical personalities, and victims of the Holocaust. Other poems explore the meaning of loss, grief, and human life. Still, her poetry expresses a fundamentally religious sense of gratitude for her own existence and that of other human beings, as well as for myriad creatures, such as hedgehogs, birds and “young leaves willing to open up to the sun.”   

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #1227410 in Books
  • Published on: 2007-07-31
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 133 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Kamienska (1920–86) belonged to the greatest generation of poets in Poland's history. Tadeusz Rozewicz, Miron Bialoszewski, Zbigniew Herbert, and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska are some of her cohorts; and on the evidence of this selection primarily of her later work, written after her husband and fellow poet Jan Spiewak's 1967 death, she is obviously of their caliber. She wrote a fully modern free verse, stripped to conceptual essentials and as simply worded as possible, like William Carlos Williams at his most crystalline. Reading her is like listening to someone who is intent on saying only the most important things. Having had a renaissance of faith after Spiewak's death, Kamienska plunged anew into the Bible, learned Hebrew, and intended to newly translate the Psalms into Polish. She took up biblical themes and more than a little of the clarity of biblical verse for her late work. Besides provocatively considering the "second happiness" of Job after everything has been restored to him, and being able in her work to overcome suffering and death through what she learned, she found, she says, "a place in me / inaccessible to unbelief / a wild patch of grace." Olson, Ray

Review

Kamienska, a major Polish writer, and equal to Nobel Prize winners Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz, grew up in the horrors of Nazi occupation and Communism. Her poetry is straightforward, full of empathy and self-discovery. It describes ordinary things - harvest time, childhood, grammer, and laundry on the balcony line. The death of her husband left her depressed and she sought the bible and other religious thinkers of the twentieth century. One line illustrates her thought processes and deep feelings over the loss of her husband. "I still cannot believe in his death. Someone who loved so much, couldn't die. So is he alive?" But it also led to a religious experience. The last part of the book contains extracts from her notebooks from 1965 to 1979. Her last poem was written three days before her death - writing of God and death. Polish American Journal December 2007


Kamienska, a major Polish writer, and equal to Nobel Prize winners Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz, grew up in the horrors of Nazi occupation and Communism. Her poetry is straightforward, full of empathy and self-discovery. It describes ordinary things - harvest time, childhood, grammer, and laundry on the balcony line. The death of her husband left her depressed and she sought the bible and other religious thinkers of the twentieth century. One line illustrates her thought processes and deep feelings over the loss of her husband. "I still cannot believe in his death. Someone who loved so much, couldn't die. So is he alive?" But it also led to a religious experience. The last part of the book contains extracts from her notebooks from 1965 to 1979. Her last poem was written three days before her death - writing of God and death. Polish American Journal December 2007

From the Inside Flap
Kamieñska came of age during the horrors of the Nazi occupation of Poland and lived under the oppression of Communism. These experiences, and the sudden death of her husband, led her to engage with the Bible and the great religious thinkers of the 20th century.

Her poems record the struggles of a rational mind with religious faith, addressing loneliness and uncertainty in a direct, unsentimental manner. While exploring the meaning of loss and grief, and the yearning for love, Kamienska's poetry still expresses a quiet humor and a pervasive sense of gratitude for human existence and for a myriad of creatures: hedgehogs, birds, and "young leaves willing to open up to the sun."

In the quiet space of Kamieñska's poems "the tenderness of things enfolds you" and words speak as eloquently as the silence.

Customer Reviews

A Treasure5
Congratulations! How moving the translation of Kamienska's work Astonishments. It is indeed that. I am grateful you brought her to us and hhope more of her poetry will be translated by you two.

Handsome edition of a great selection of poetry!5
I was lucky to get my hands on an advanced copy of Astonishments. It's really a handsome book with a large selection of very interesting poems. I highly recommend for anyone interested in poetry. It also makes an elegant gift with it's hard cover, meaty substance, interesting variety of writing styles (the selection includes fragments from her notebooks) and nice quality paper. Plus, the cover art looks good on your coffee table.