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Original Essays | June 27, 2009

All posts by Fran Cannon Slayton On Wakes and Rum (and Coke)

"Unfortunately, I've been to my fair share of wakes." Continue »


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    When the Whistle Blows

    Fran Cannon Slayton

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More copies of this ISBN:

In Praise of the Unfinished: Selected Poems

by Julia Hartwig

In Praise of the Unfinished: Selected Poems Cover

ISBN13: 9780307267207
ISBN10: 0307267202
Condition: Standard
Dustjacket: Standard
All Product Details

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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Hailed by Czeslaw Milosz as “the grande dame of Polish poetry” and named “one of the foremost Polish poets of the twentieth century” 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 Hartwig’s poems. She evokes the husbands who returned silent from battle (“What woman was told about the hell at Monte Cassino?”) and asks, “Why didn’t I dance on the Champs-Élysées / 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.” 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: “an ermine’s cry, moan of a dove, / complaint of an owl—that remind us / the hardship of solitude is measured out equally.”

Hartwig’s 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 pines—the 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.

Product Details

ISBN:
9780307267207
Subtitle:
Selected Poems
Author:
Hartwig, Julia
Translator:
Carpenter, John
Translator:
Carpenter, Bogdana
Publisher:
Alfred A. Knopf
Subject:
Continental european
Subject:
Hartwig, Julia
Publication Date:
March 2008
Binding:
Hardcover
Language:
English
Pages:
143
Dimensions:
8.90x6.52x.56 in. .85 lbs.

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