Maria Jastrzębska is a key Anglo-Polish and European poet and no stranger to exploring heritage and archetypal figures of family. In this new work she widens her gaze. Unable – or unwilling – to settle, her speakers are nomadic. The personal is always political, the political – unmistakably human. Whether crossing borders, both literal and intangible, queering or reimagining histories, these poems urgently question the present, startle and illuminate. She is equally fluent in prose poem or lyric as well as the extraordinary and quizzical language of Ponglish.
Praise for Small Odysseys
Martina Evans:
Maria Jastrzębska’s Small Odysseys is the odyssey of a lifetime. Dark fables begin in a childhood wardrobe hideout haunted by Eastern European forests and its images of sensuous fur and petrol bombs act a coda for vital living poems which explore history, migration, identity and mental illness, perfectly poised on the border between a transcendent surrealism and hard realism.
John McCullough:
In Small Odysseys, Maria Jastrzębska summons a past where both personal and social traumas are reshaped by imagination. A father is born in a matchbox, an upturned table is a beetle on its back and hands smelling of herring are judged to be ‘at their most Polish.’ Against a backdrop of war, uprisings, homophobia and shifting cultural identities, these poems inhabit experiences of vulnerability created as often by the absence of a brother as by nationalist forces. Intimate and disturbing, playful and strange, they confront the dark with trained eyes and a questing heart.
Wioletta Greg:
Small Odysseys is an unusual and beautiful book, a multidimensional journey through time and space. I call Maria Jastrzębska’s poems ‘acts of rediscovery’, which draw in abundant fistfuls from the world and her experiences. The narrator calls up what she finds precious, what provokes her reflection, stirs joy, sorrow or dread. One moment it is a clump of cornflowers in a wheatfield seen out the of corner of one eye, where a red butterfly has setled. Another time a dream, family stories overheard, a sudden memory of childhood, of travel, the Adriatic wind, a hawk tearing the sky, a scorpion in a doorframe, a pigeon landing at her feet on the pavement.
THE TRUE STORY OF COWBOY HAT AND INGÉNUE(Cinnamon Press/Liquorice Fish 2018)
ISBN: 9781911540038
In a landscape scarred by conflict, two women begin a quest for a lost child and a lost world of peace. Bound together by love and acceptance, their story and path interweave with fellow outcasts — people like the ever-suave Dame Blanche, Sister Asunta, martial artist and magician, Master Wu Wu, and the lost soul, Tulip — but whether peace is simply the end of war or something deeper is something they must discover for themselves.
A haunting tale, told in a series of visionary prose poems, The True Story of Cowboy Hat & Ingénue interweaves memory and yearning to ask questions that reflect on our past and, disturbingly, on our futures.
Praise for The True Story of Cowboy Hat and Ingénue
Moniza Alvi:
The True Story of Cowboy Hat and Ingénue crosses boundaries, including those of sexual identity, cultures and language. There’s eroticism and adventure here, as well as conflict and sharp pain. Maria Jastrzębska excels at the ‘borderline’ form of the prose poem and with these linked pieces it’s as if she presents us with an epic in a small space. To read it is to be challenged as well as enchanted.
Gregory Woods:
A grittily tender romance that sparks a rare kind of pleasure: the lush austerity of its language has you both sumptuously satisfied and yet longing for more.
Janet Sutherland:
The True Story of Cowboy Hat and Ingénue will remain with you long after you’ve read the final page. Set out as prologue, first, second and final parts the reader is guided through a sequence of juxtaposed prose poems. There is a central love story between Cowboy Hat and Ingénue, two women questing for a lost child, a lost world of peace in a war-torn landscape – I won’t tell you how their story ends. The prose poem form concentrates the writing – there is delight in individual pieces as well as in the whole, such as when Dame Blanche tells Ingenue how to conceal a razor blade in her mouth “The trick is to loosen the tongue so it floats like a little ship bobbing under the roof of your mouth. Open your lips. See, there’s a tiny stove on board from which smoke coils…” and in no time she is describing the breath forming rings, the rings slipping out of the mouth, the animals who were on board “ jump into the shallows round your tongue, clear the ridge of your bottom teeth, climbing over your lip”. The next prose poem in the sequence is about kisses and so one has magically loosened the tongue in the mouth. The next, after that, is a particularly difficult but powerful piece about war. Around the central story of Cowboy Hat and Ingénue roam other stories, other characters, some characters return, and we learn more about them but, as in life, some we meet only once. The writing is intense, concentrated, memorable, and meaningful. As Moniza Alvi says on the back cover “it’s as if she presents us with an epic in a small space. To read it is to be challenged as well as enchanted”.
Robert Hamberger:
The True Story of Cowboy Hat & Ingénue is an intense, engrossing read in an original form. Maria Jastrzębska’s prose poem weaves an atmospheric love story alongside sharp and moving portrayals of queer communities under threat. These stories move skilfully through the terror of a continuous war, which can’t be wholly escaped or explained. The reader never quite knows where each paragraph (or stanza) will take us, and that’s part of the book’s adventure, as each visceral detail is wonderfully evoked. With Jastrzębska’s taut and compelling language never putting a foot wrong, I was rooting for Cowboy Hat and Ingenue to make it through.
Albert Camus:
Maria Jastrzębska is a Polish/English poet who always has her finger on the pulse and here she is questioning what prose and poetry are, inserting Spanish into an English narrative as if it was second nature. But she’s also a poet of conscience and while this story in poetry may have a playful title, it starts with genocide – and the horror of war is dotted through it. Carolyn Forché is quoted at the start, which is a hint to a reader that this is going to be an uncompromising ride. However, just consider the name of one of the central characters, Ingenue, for another hint – there’s subtle humour in this lesbian romance, the writer is playing with stereotypes as well as subverting the old Hollywood wild west narrative. Tune into this humour and you’ll be delighted at the sophistication of this storytelling. Interspersed with the play are passages so lyrical that you dream.
Helen Joubert Artist & Rainbow Reader:
How to write a review that does justice to this treasure of a book? I’ve had an image of a kaleidoscope in my head since reading it. The format – paragraphs of prose/poetry – tells the story like a turn of the kaleidoscope reveals a new image. You never see the whole picture, but the pieces fall into a jewelled constellation that tantalisingly shows you part of the story, and then is gone. You never see the same picture twice, but each is a perfect shot of pleasure, wisdom, or anguish. Maria captures the illusive nature of meaning so deftly in her final image of a reflection on water “…One sigh of the wind is all it takes and everything’s gone…”
David Caddy (Tears in the Fence, 71, Spring 2020):
Maria Jastrzębska’s The True Story of Cowboy Hat and Ingénue, an absorbing sequence of prose poems following two women’s journey across the war-torn landscape in searchable rural utopia in the mould of Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger is utterly distinctive and different. The sequence dissolves conventional boundaries of time narrative in order to produce a hyper-reality of interconnected stories within a love story and an expanded range of otherness, in terms of identity, voice and languages. Cowboy Hat and Ingénue meet Dame Blanche, a giant black man, who runs the El Dorado bar, and Mercedes the brothel keeper and a host of other outcasts and victims of oppression. The range of voices and languages, the various narratives all succinctly described, are all impressive and produce an exhilarating read.
CEDRY Z WALPOLE PARK / THE CEDARS OF WALPOLE PARK(K.I.T. Stowarzyszenie Żywych Poetów, Poland, 2015)
Selected poems
Translators: Anna Błasiak, Paweł Gawroński and Wioletta Grzegorzewska
Editors: Wioletta Grzegorzewska and Anna Błasiak
Praise for Cedry z Walpole Park / The Cedars of Walpole Park
Eliza Szybowicz:
This poet’s coat of arms has a wolf on it. Her language sniffs out, tracks, rips flesh, fights, sometimes chooses escape, parties madly, desires. Don’t you wish you were in her pack!
Ta poetka ma w herbie wilka. W języku węszy, tropi, szarpie mięso, walczy, czasem wybiera ucieczkę, szaleńczo się bawi, pożąda. Chciałoby się należeć do jej watahy!
Urszula Chowaniec, University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies:
The Cedars… is a poet’s record of coming from elsewhere. It’s the lyrical outline of the imagination of a child of migrant parents. A girl whose everyday language is alien to her parents. The Cedars… is a landscape of the constant tension between what is familiar and what is alien.
This is an important collection, especially at a time when migration, an ever present element of human history, has become the subject of public controversies. After all post-war Europe created the impossible myth of home, of rootedness, which can be achieved only by the very few. So the title poem warns of ever present danger, ‘when you can’t go home’, while throughout the entire collection there is the theme of anxiety about life where ‘words are too difficult’ in ‘this strange language’.
In elegantly crafted, beautiful, original and nostalgic – never sentimental – stories, Maria Jastrzębska shows us a reality filled with arrivals and separations in which ‘the two strangers’ can turn out to be your grandparents. At the same time The Cedars… are a fascinating journey into poetry at once insightful and rich which wrestles with language and yet attempts through language to recreate memories of colour, scent (‘The Room of Smells’) or touch (‘Kissing’).
Bilingual collections encourage us to read in parallel and make comparisons. When the translations are bold, interesting and done well, such comparison becomes a reading in its own right, rather than a test of faithful translation. In the kaleidoscope of migratory themes in Jastrzębska’s poetry the tension between English and Polish versions creates a further field of interpretation. Which is the original version? The initial one or the translation? Which language should we use to describe the poetic landscape and emotions emanating from The Cedars… to make them most true? The answer remains with each reader.
Cedry… to poetycki zapis bycia skądinąd. To liryczny szkic wyobraźni dziecka emigrantów. Dziewczynki, której język ojczysty jest obcy jej rodzicom. Cedry… to pejzaż bezustannej napięć między tym, co znane i co obce.
To ważny tomik poezji, zwłaszcza w naszych czasach, w który migracja, ten od zawsze obecny w ludzkiej historii element, stał się tematem publicznych kontrowersji. Bo też powojenna Europa zbudowała niemożliwy mit domu, zakorzenienia, który udaje się zrealizować tylko nielicznym. Zatem tytułowy wiersz przestrzega o zawsze obecnym zagrożeniu, kiedy „nie dasz rady wrócić do domu”, a w całym zbiorze pojawia się motyw lęku o życie w „za trudnym języku”, w „tym dziwnym języku”.
Maria Jastrzębska pokazuje, w zgrabnie skonstruowanych lirycznych, pięknych, niebanalnie nostalgicznych i nigdy łzawych historiach, rzeczywistość pełną przylotów i rozstań, barier, w której „tych dwoje obcych ludzi” może okazać się twoimi dziadkami. I jednocześnie Cedry… to ciekawa wycieczka w poezję wnikliwą i bogatą, walczącą z językiem i starającą się przez język przywrócić pamięć o kolorach, zapachach („Pokój zapachów…”) czy dotyku („Całowanie”).Dwujęzyczne tomiki zachęcają do czytania równoległego i porównań. Gdy tłumaczenia są odważne, interesujące i dobre te porównania stają się kolejnym czytaniem, a nie sprawdzaniem wierności przekładu. W kalejdoskopie migracyjnych tematów poezji Jastrzębskiej napięcie między angielską i polską wersją tworzy dodatkowa przestrzeń interpretacyjną. Która wersja jest oryginalna? Ta pierwotna czy tłumaczenie? W którym języku opowiedzieć krajobraz poetycki, emocje, które wyłaniają się z Cedrów…, aby były najprawdziwsze? Odpowiedź należy do każdego Czytelnika.
Reading poems from The Cedars of Walpole Park collection made me think of Rilke. Or rather his dedication to Marina Tsvetaeva when he sent a copy of his Duino Elegies to Paris for her. “One poet only lives, and now and then who bore him, and who bears him now, will meet.” The poems of Maria Jastrzębska, a poet of Polish origin writing in English, seem to me familiar in the best sense. They contain detail, history, metaphysics. There are wolves, or rather wolves’ memories, and there is a girl. Also a leather satchel, which falls in slow motion into the moat at London Zoo in 1932. Such captured detail not only fashions anecdote but also means the poems are like the cedars of the title: you can climb/ into its flat, open boughs -/you can sail away in a tree like that. Rilke’s dedication was translated into Polish by Adam Zagajewski. You could say it was lucky – no word was lost in translation, none lost its meaning. Maria Jastrzebska’s poems have been equally lucky. In superb translations by Anna Błasiak, Wioletta Grzegorzewska and Pawel Gawroński, they sound clearly and are like the bumbleees in the poem of that same title which granny Julka held to her ear. They hummed, grumbling in the dark/space between her palms and then/she’d let them go.
Behind a curtain of leaves, behind the trees – people’s shadows, heart-breaking stories told with reticence and hesitation. Something to do with nationality, memory, language and something about gender. Identity patiently revealed in the next image, memory, experience.
Za zasłoną z liści, za drzewami – ludzkie cienie, przejmujące historie opowiadane z powściągliwością i wahaniem. Coś z narodowością, pamięcią, językiem i coś z płcią. Tożsamość cierpliwie wyjaśniana z następnym obrazkiem, wspomnieniem, doznaniem.
At The Library of Memories leads the reader from the ghost of one room to another, via the senses and catching at fragments of stories. This is an invitation to examine not only individual, arresting memories — at once familiar and disturbing — but the process of remembering itself. How we come to terms with our own past and what collectively we make of it are questions running in and out of these uncompromising, vital and thrilling poems.
Praise for At The Library of Memories
Susan Wicks:
In Maria Jastrzębska’s new collection memory is a powerful and truthful tool, admitting fallibility and never exceeding its prerogative, yet evoking a whole world of tastes and smells, longings, anxieties and human needs. This is vivid, thought-provoking poetry that takes us by stages to the heart of the immigrant experience and leaves us with urgent questions which imperceptibly have become our own.
Nick Drake:
Maria Jastrzębska’s epic new collection is fabulous, audacious and compelling; here are dazzling conjurings of lost times and places, tremendously moving elegies, and astonishing fragments of intricate stories recovered from lost worlds. This exceptional collection is the work of a poet at the height of her imaginative powers.
Maria Jastrzębska’s Everyday Angels leaves you to ‘expect only light’ from the marginal figures portrayed in the title poem and casting arresting shadows of narrative attention: paraffin stoves, parcels crossing borders, the everyday things thronging this powerful second collection of a poet transcribing from the fissure of Polish and English, translations of language and objects; and from one consciousness, one history, to another’s. Memorial and family – even familiar – poems frame Jastrzębska’s theme. Nothing is taken for granted as she scores her adoptive English with the memory of a Polish mother-tongue. This renders her almost unique in English. Only abroad, with those untrustworthy continentals and their borders, could one encounter such mutedly thrilling disquiet.
Praise for Everyday Angels
Lee Harwood:
Everyday Angels is a book filled with stories, such great vivid stories that span many worlds, that of Poland and Britain, and those places where they overlap in the past and present.
Jackie Wills:
Maria’s Jastrzębska’s poetry explores major concerns of our age – exile, dementia and sexuality. She records the resilience of parents forced to leave their country, giving the places, people and rituals they left a shimmering, out-of-reach quality. This estrangement is embedded in language rich with names and phrases, always on the seam of the surreal. A mother at different stages of her life, but in particular, fractured by dementia, girls on a bus, lovers, aunts – Jastrzębska’s writing is knowing and humane. This [Everyday Angels] is an uplifting collection.
The shadow and tenor of two tongues, cultures, histories, and sexualities are deftly embedded in her poetry — as is her use of forms, both in her traditional couplets and prose poems. She is willing to take risks, unafraid to display passion, and at the same time writes controlled intelligent verse. I’ll Be Back Before You Know It is a carefully considered collection of new poems.
