Small Odysseys
I’m so excited my new poetry collection Small Odysseys* is coming out in October 2022 from Waterloo Press.
I started writing it at the same time as my last book The True Story of Cowboy Hat and Ingénue (Cinnamon Press) and thought all the poems would be part of one bigger book. But then The True Story of Cowboy Hat and Ingénue galloped off at a rapid pace in a different direction. Dr Danne Jobin who I talked to recently in their series Poetology described it as a prose poetry novella. I like that. I think of it as a story told through prose poems or as one long prose poem in fact. I had to finish it before I could write anything else. Like the book before it*, it had a unifying theme, underlying structure. There was a narrative arc in The True Story of Cowboy Hat and Ingénue even if it was fractured or non-linear, told in intersecting fragments which prose poems hold so well.
But then once that book was out in the world I could go back to the poems I had begun and left for a while. They were waiting patiently for me. Poems are good like that. And then I began to write more and more – until I had a whole new book. I had no clear idea where it would lead. This was a slow cook. In some ways that made it harder, scarier to write. I finished it just before the pandemic began. Though I edited it, fine-combing, during lockdown I decided not to add poems about Covid 19 as they didn’t belong. The manuscript already had its own shape and logic. Having said that I’m aware how the need for human connection was brought home to us so sharply by the pandemic. (For more information about the title I chose etc there are some blogs I wrote while editing: https://wordpress.com/post/mariajastrzebska.wordpress.com/1333)
It’s a very different book from The True Story of Cowboy Hat and Ingénue. That was set in an imaginary Hispanic/American kind of landscape inspired by travels both in California and Spain. The poems in Small Odysseys are set in Europe, in Slovenia, on Crete, in Germany, Spain, in the former Soviet Union, Poland and the UK. But also more importantly in that in-between space many of us navigate as we move between cultures and sub-cultures, geographical locations, identities. It mixes prose poems with lyrical ones. It includes the strange hybrid language of Ponglish. And poems are often set in a place between past and present. Some are poems where I have reimagined historical moments.
While the book doesn’t try for a unifying theme, preferring its own different pathways, at its heart there is separation, within family, within society and how we try to deal with both. How we try to connect in the face of breakdown, implosion, distance.
When I first began writing Small Odysseys the UK voted to leave the European Union. This wasn’t just a decision about trade – although the lorry queues at Dover are a clear example of its stupidity. It was a decision of far-reaching implications – a green light given to the racism and xenophobia we had fought here for many years. Its shadow hangs over the book – indirectly as is often the case in poetry.
I wasn’t alone in feeling broken-hearted about Brexit. We were and still are being subjected to a ‘make Britain great again’ fantasy, waves of nostalgia for British colonialism and imperialism. At the same time in my homeland the Polish government was – and continues – doing its utmost to undermine democracy, decimating women’s rights and promoting hatred against LGBTQ+ communities and individuals. Narratives of the second world war were and are appropriated to serve government ideology.
Against this backdrop, history and who narrates it become even more important. I’ve always written about love and war and in this book there are both re-imaginings of the past and explorations of the present. We need all the stories we can get about the people history books leave out as well as stories about who were are now. We have to show that what is happening around us is not being done in our name.
The gap between finishing a book and publication plays tricks too. As refugees from Ukraine flee across the Polish border from the Russian government’s genocide I am even more poignantly aware of our connections both across Europe and with other continents. Bridging distances and separations with warmth and food and kindness is more important than ever. A welcome which has to include refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, not only Europe. Otherwise our whole world becomes just one immense ‘hostile environment’*.
Small Odysseys will be launched by Waterloo Press at the Coast is Queer Literature Festival October 7-9th in Brighton.
1*You can pre order Small Odysseys here
2*At the Library of Memories (Waterloo Press)
3*The ‘Home Office Hostile Environment policy’ was first introduced in the UK under the Conservative Lib-Dem coalition government in 2012 to make staying in the UK as difficult as possible for people without official leave to remain. As well as being government policy it has also become a whole social ethos. In 2018 the Windrush scandal exposed how hundreds of Caribbean immigrants to the UK had been harassed under this policy, many of whom were detained and deported to countries they had not lived in for countless years. Currently the British government continues with its plan to expel asylum seekers, deporting them to Rwanda.