Book Launching: \"Astonishments: Selected Poems of Anna Kamienska\"

Following an introduction by moderator Joanna Rostropowicz Clark, scholar of comparative literature and a frequent contributor to the cultural supplement of the Polish Daily, and with commentary by the poet and Columbia University lecturer Anna Frajlich, poems by Anna Kamienska will be read in English and Polish by playwright and Columbia professor Austin Flint and by actress  Elzbieta Czyzewska.
 
Anna Kamienska  (1920-1986), a major Polish writer widely acknowledged as a peer of Nobel Prize winners Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz, left a rich legacy that includes fifteen books of poetry; two volumes of  Notebooks,  providing a short-hand record of her readings and self-questioning; three volumes of commentaries on the Bible; and translations from several Slavic languages as well as from Hebrew, Latin and French.
 
Kamienska came of age during the horrors of the Nazi occupation of  Poland and then lived under Communism. These experiences, as well as the sudden death of her husband, the well-known poet Jan Spiewak, opened up in her work a period of reflection: a subtle thinker and expert on ancient cultures (her translation of Metamorphoses by Aristophanes is considered a jewel), she dedicated herself to developing a fresh approach to understanding the Bible, while also studying the great religious thinkers of the 20th century.
 
Her poems record the struggles of a rational mind with religious faith, addressing loneliness and uncertainty in a remarkably direct, unsentimental manner. Her spiritual quest resulted in extraordinary poems on Job and other biblical figures, as well as the victims of the Holocaust. Other poems explore the meaning of loss, grief, and human life, many in response to the loss of her mother and her husband. Yet her poetry expresses an appreciation of the beauty of all “impermanent things,” and a fundamentally religious sense of gratitude for her own existence and that of other human beings, hedgehogs, birds, and “young leaves willing to open up to the sun.”
BOOK LAUNCHING: “ASTONISHMENTS: SELECTED POEMS OF ANNA KAMIENSKA”
edited and translated by Grazyna Drabik & David Curzon, Paraclete Press, July 2007
Published with support of the Polish Cultural Institute

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2007,  7:30 PM
DE  LAMAR  MANSION
CONSULATE GENERAL OF POLAND
233 Madison Avenue at 37th Street,  New York,  NY  10016
Please, bring your photo ID with you