Marzanna Bogumiła Kielar (born in 1963), philosophy graduate, gained critical acclaim with her first book of poems Sacra conversazione (1992), which immediately received two very prestigious poetry awards: the Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna Prize, and the Kościelski Foundation Prize. Her long-awaited second volume, Materia prima, was shortlisted for the NIKE Literary Prize, the most prestigious of Polish awards, in 2000. The bilingual German selection, In den Rillen eisiger Stunden (trans. Renate Schmidgall; Stuttgart: Edition Solitude, 2000), which draws on both volumes, has been awarded the 2001 Herman-Lenz-Preis: Die Hubert-Burda Stypendium. Perhaps the finest of the younger generation women poets (she has been compared to Sappho), Kielar writes poetry that contemplates the small details and sensuous pleasures of everyday life. The poems’ meditative calm, however, proves disturbingly misleading, as the natural order of things sinks giddily off into the unknown, as one image interpenetrates another. Subtlety reveals urgency, warmth recedes into cold. In the strangely appealing landscapes of Kielar’s poetry mystery has to be faced with awe, death has to be challenged with creativity.

Salt Monody is available from Zephyr Press.

Copyright © Marzanna Bogumiła Kielar , translation copyright © Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese, reproduced by kind permission of the author

***

low shore of the night before us; cold; wet dunes
are coming closer; black in the gusts of rain,
as if light were finally freeing
itself from matter. The lane cuts its curved runner
into the dusk, as into a shoal of embers,
cooled; broken to lumps, the element
rolls over the beach, scatters, throws dust
into the air niche;
we’re not switching the lamp on. Silent, stunned;
our bedroom like an empty resort, a blind shell,
as in the sea rumbling opposite

***

sun setting in August: a drop
revives the night

with the tip of my tongue to touch
this moisture

Telephone

you were burning dry branches and weeds
– I heard fire rustle in the receiver, your whistle when the dogs
once again tried to get at the mole-hills where yesterday

we picked plums from among the rampant grass;
evening drew near – the wind blew breath
into its puppy muzzle.

The sticky prunes, we ate them for supper.
I was leafing through a book on water gardens, photographs
of marsh plants – I wanted to memorize their names: marsh marigold,

sedge, floating pond-weed –
when suddenly you said, “I would like to die
before you.”

In your country house, yesterday, I watched you fall asleep
reading – sleep like a backwash
sewed up the oar of your body.

I took the book out of your hands, switched off the light.
The rib of night
was shining in the branches

***

we ran into harsh shadow of an oak, with our dog, in February full moon.
And we were like magpies

in a burnt-out air hole, like trout
thrown into crushed ice

Thaw

as if the weight of a snapping branch stripped off the bark, revealed
the pulp of a living tree –

daybreak; flat splinters enter the thawing pond,
strew the gate and roof of the empty greenhouse.
The bark on the trunk of the night dries out
and bursts – from the ground to the crown’s base,
and touchwood lights up.
But the colors deepen, gain brilliance, clarity,
as if life were yet to begin.
In the snow, veins open up, full of clotted grass, sand,
burgeoning silt –

crows drink from them

The Hawk

water fabric creased by a cold wind, marine-blue, heavy,
torn; the wing-flutter, impetuous,
far from shore – in the sun the lake glints,
a steel blade;

blood, materia prima. Headlong it combs through
the abyss that engulfs,
throttles it