Six poems by Marzanna Bogumila Kielar

Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese

  

The austerity of Marzanna Bogumila Kielar’s mindscape compels with its monochromy. White, grey, black; chilly, cold, freezing; and occasional red. This stark concentration is strengthened by the poems’ insistent returns to the same place: northern Poland, where Kielar (born in 1963) grew up. ‘It is the landscape whose pulse and vibrations I can sense in my blood,’ she admits. Though her work as a lecturer in philosophy requires her to live in Warsaw, she feels ‘an emigrant’ there. ‘My first homeland is a post-German landscape,’ Kielar explains, also in connection with her interests outside poetry: ethnology, sociology, cultural anthropology. She has conducted field interviews with the inhabitants of the area (which, after World War II, witnessed the deportation of Germans and ethnic Mazurians as well as the arrival of Ukrainians and Poles) in order to investigate how these people establish an emotional bond with the space they inhabit, how they symbolically take it into possession – the questions her poetry asks.

Kielar’s poems do not directly reflect the historical concerns of Poland (like other young Polish poets who started to publish after 1989, she is freed from such responsibilities – even if she claims to be an attentive reader of Milosz). Nor do they straightforwardly confront the canonical juxtapositions between the cultured and the primitive, as the titles of her two collections, Sacra Conversatione and Materia Prima, might suggest. Instead, they chart a uniquely intimate territory, reaching with quickened sensitivity for the metaphysical. Subtle and sensuous, they contemplate the strangeness of the world, distrusting its luscious beauty, which attracts but also misleads. This sensuality, complemented by cool, rational analysis, frequently leads critics to comparisons with Halina Poswiatowska. However, Kielar herself prefers to point out her affinities with Julia Hartwig, the Polish poet of Szymborska’s generation, as well as with Elizabeth Bishop – both known for their acute observation. Just like Bishop, Kielar is adamant that there exists no division into female and male poetry, there is only good and bad poetry. She mentions Celan, Kavafy, Montale, Amichai and Tranströmer as her ‘mentors’. She also values the prose of Karen Blixen for its ‘pure, precise language’, and that of Bruno Schultz with ‘its disrupted, cracked worlds, which contain more than one universe’.

It is difficult not to notice that Kielar’s poems, too, disclose – or collapse – more than one universe. They exercise alertness: their meditative calm, luminosity, sublimity reveal, reading after reading, darker undercurrents, anxiety, urgency. They reveal truth about death or, rather, its unrelenting secrecy. Not by chance does Sacra Conversatione open with the poem of August harvesting colours, undercut by the concluding couplet: ‘soft hills stand in the luscious light,/ onto the grasses, low, death comes down’. The volume closes with ‘Winter Elegy’, whose repeated patterning comments on the opening poem. ‘Winter Elegy’ prefigures Materia Prima with its icebound landscape imagery. Yet, it is the poet’s ‘mind of winter’ that helps her behold a crack, a split through which light starts seeping in: and the thaw approaches. To Understand Glaciers is Kielar’s favourite non-poetry book.

Manuscript

autumnal peatbog – the breath of poplar and alder

shortens; the light grows dwarfish, pale bonsai,

clutched in the ebb of noon;

the wind prods smouldering dry twigs,

debris of leaves trapped in a roll

of wire-netting, as if, voiceless, it pieced together words

in a foreign tongue, feeling

for knotted nerves, hollowed syllables

under the rime

Winter Elegy

 

how fast: the calm avarice of white;

a fragile flock of crows darkens, vanishes in the cracks of the road.

My breath bright on the window-pane. Subdued with purple, vast,

wide-open fields. Dried-out ponds, docile

as under the touch of a gentle hand,

as if it wasn’t a bandage of frost.

Hills are cooling over the tops of apple-trees and alders,

a window in the distance lights up. Sparks of warmth wander

into the ashes of dusk

and, not thinking, I break up a slice of bread:

we, how fast, into the cracks of time, hollow

and like stone.

‘The line of snow and light …’

the line of snow and night – sun like a freezing stone,

ruddy porphyry, under the apron of rock rubble,

weathered waste that slides down, piles ellipses

above the horizon; the barren edge

of a January day, frost-powdered air. Birches

drawn in chalk on the snow, left to the rains.

Startled by the noise of an engine,

crows are whirling.

Ice has long fed on water and the marrow of days, it claims

the glass of the unheated verandah; things have cooled down

and each in its mould

is ready to be taken out.

The ice dust sparkles, strews the balcony, from nowhere –

as if in the sunlight a snow bridge trembled, high up,

over a hidden crevice

‘Silence of a daybreak…’

1.

silence of a daybreak cut to the bone; waiting,

till at least the wind comes back, clouds gather soot, and light

drifts into cracks;

till the least gleam – a teaspoon on a saucer, scattered

papers, bed-sheets. And a dry flame will consume

the burnt-out timber of disclosed things

2.

torn into strips, the light is supporting trees, entrails

of water steam; it dawns. Sun is a mere split

in a cast-iron cauldron of fire –

‘A flock of pigeons …’

a flock of pigeons blossoms white against the grayish cloth

of a cloud, over the town, as I’m drawing back the curtains,

and softly flows down:

the day has just breathed in fresh air; naked

– what names does it await now,

in the gray alleyways?

You’re asleep, haven’t turned your head; your fist clutches

at the sheet, shadow of the night – withdrawing,

it says, composed and assured: ‘I will give you back

only for a little while.’

‘And again the sea in my blood …’

1.

And again the sea in my blood -

deserted pier, wind, returning touch,

as if it wanted to assure me that I am. Now, when what's past

vanishes in the polar lengths of memory, and up the live landslide, up

                                                                        the coils of the body

light is climbing.

The sun descends into the languid depth, pressed against its belly.

Then narrow frayed clouds stampede low with a gathering wind,

lifting the ridges of the waves.

And the whole sky hurries and the dark foamy side of the sea, in

                                                                            persistent rhythm,

walks at the thigh of the beach.

I have numerous eyes, like animal fur and feathers,

the heart sewn in a durable sack, - and again it beats in its bony

                                                                                            basket.

2.

Glimmering coal ships, laborious insects, as if their holds

were carrying glitter.

From the seaside boulevard Jaffa can be seen, and the lane where

                                                                                     we stopped

in the heat of the night. And the night bore us inside

like an embodied dream.

Cirrus feathers over the sea lingering at dawn -

falling asleep, we took its pulse for ours.

The town on the long wave of dunes -

fat rain has just wetted the streets and branches,

sun dipped its hands in them, to the bottom, as in a barrel of

                                                                                        rainwater;

car bodies and cedars of Lebanon are drying.Cogs of the machinery

                                                                         glisten: it turns, rolls

the bones of life

Poems translated by Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese
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