Research Catalog

Title

Talking to my body / Anna Swir ; translated by Czeslaw Milosz & Leonard Nathan.

Author

Świrszczyńska, Anna

Publication

Port Townsend, Wash. : Copper Canyon Press, c1996.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

• Copper Canyon Press publisher.
• Miłosz, Czesław
• Nathan, Leonard, 1924-2007

Description

ix, 159 p.; 22 cm.

Summary

"Swir was one of Poland's most distinguished poets, and she was open in her feminism and eroticism, with poetry that explored the life of the female body -- from the agonizing depths of wartime to delirious sensual delight. The New York Times wrote that Swir's poetry pointed toward a "ferocious internal life." A member of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation and a military nurse in a makeshift hospital during the Warsaw Uprising, Swir once waited an hour fully expecting to be executed. Affected deeply by her experience, she wrote a poetry which rejected the grand gestures of war in favor of a world cast in miniature, a world in which the body and individual survive. Co-translated by Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan, with an introduction by Milosz, who writes: "What is the central theme of these poems? Answer: Flesh. Flesh in love and ecstasy, in pain, in terror, flesh afraid of loneliness, giving birth, resting, feeling the flow of time or reducing time to one instant. By such a clear delineation of her subject matter, Anna Swir achieves in her sensual, fierce poetry a nearly calligraphic neatness."--Goodreads

Subject

• 1900-1999
• Polish poetry > 20th century
• Świrszczyńska, Anna > Translations into English

Genre/Form

Translations

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Poems About My Father and My Mother -- A Cardboard Suitcase -- My Father Would Recall -- My Mother, Miss Stasia -- Soup for the Poor -- An Artist Moves -- Before Dawn -- White Wedding Slippers -- They Saved Me -- Three Pieces of Candy -- I Am Eleven -- Vacations in Kurpieland -- My Father's Workshop -- Christmas Eve -- He Did Not Jump from the Third Floor -- Father in Krakow -- Mother Sings Again -- Mother Dying -- She Came to Say Farewell -- In the Other World -- Her Death is in Me -- Calm Down -- He Sang All His Life -- Old Madman -- I Wash the Shirt -- He Strode Against the Tide -- A Film About My Father -- We Survived Them -- Wind -- I Am Filled with Love -- Happiness -- Woman Unborn -- Troubles with the Soul at Morning Calisthenics -- Myself and My Person -- Maternity -- A Visit -- Seventy Years -- Tears -- Terminally Ill -- My Suffering -- To Be a Woman -- A Woman Talks to Her Thigh -- Three Bodies -- You Are Warm -- I Sleep in Blue Pajamas.

ISBN

155659108X

LCCN

^^^96010015^

OCLC

34517602

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library