Anna Kamieńska (1920–1986)

Lovely, but grim. I cannot give this to my mom right now.

Poetry & Notes of Anna Kamienska

The work of the prolific Polish poet Anna Kamienska has taken a long time to become available to poetry lovers in America. This June, Poetry Magazine published excerpts from her Notebooks making many aware that her poetry has only been available in English translation for four years (Paraclete Press 2007.) It is a shame that this talented artist has been ignored for so long. The spiritual themes of her poetry will echo with many as will her simple statements show more on life and death.


Kamienska lived her life in the turmoil that was Poland of the 20th century. She was less than twenty when the Nazis occupied Poland and she lived under that barbarous rule for five years. The Nazis were succeeded by communist rule for most of the rest of her life. In the 70’s she was forbidden to publish because of her political views.

In many respects her life had been an extraordinary one despite the turbulence around her. She had become a published poet at the age of seventeen and went on to publish twenty books of poetry as well as her Notebooks in two volumes, translations from French and Russian, and a series of young adult fiction. When she was allowed to work she was an editor on some of the notable Polish literary journals.

She married a fellow poet Jan Spiewak in 1947. Judging from the tone of the poetry addressed to him it was an extraordinary successful marriage. When he suddenly died of cancer at the age of 49 Kamienska was
bereft. For the rest of her life her poetry reflected her
loss. His death also caused her to turn to spiritual and mystical themes in her poetry. She became a student of Hebrew to study the Bible and wrote on biblical and other religious themes.

Soon after Spiewak’s death she began to keep a series of notes that were published after her death as Notebooks in two volumes. These contained her thoughts on her work as well as comments on poetry, the spiritual life and on other writers that she found interesting. It is excerpts from these that were published in Poetry, which promises to publish another set in the fall of 2010.

These excerpts show an artist’s views on a variety of subjects, especially death. For her death was a something always with her “death is not a gate to the other world, perhaps it is just an opening of invisible eyes.” “When Jan died I was 47 years old. I try on death as women try on a friend’s hat.” Referring to her husband’s death, “I sought a dead man and found God.”
At one point she imagines her husband speaking to her: “Let’s not get up today.” “Let’s take rest after all that??”
My dead always surround me. I walk in an invisible crowd.

She states: “In recording these thoughts …In this sense they are my real life.” If so she was a poet constantly. The excerpts from her notes are alive with comments on poetry. In fact the translators of the Paraclete edition take for their title a quote from the notes: “ ‘laborious astonishments’ – that is for many reasons an apt definition of poetry.”
Her poetry is readable, she uses natural language and structure. She builds her poems around a world that is hers.

“It is not from the grand
but from every tiny thing
that it grows enormous
as if Someone was building Eternity
as a swallow its nest
out of clumps of moments.”

And in building them she attaches them to a spiritual world that she never let’s us forget. She builds catalogues of paradoxes highlighting human vulnerabilities and contradictions. All is grounded in the ordinary but observed with a poet’s eye as in:

THE HEDGEHOG

A hedgehog graced us with his existence
with comical fidelity to children’s books
a yellow leaf speared on one quill
and black enamel claws
so all of a sudden
we felt wonderfully unreal
while he kept stomping on his way
with all his earthy wisdom

SOURCES

Astonishments: selected poems of Anna Kamienska
Translated and edited by Grazyna Drabik and David Curzon

Poetry Magazine: June 2010 show less