Indeed I Love - Właśnie Kocham

by Halina Poświatowska, Maya Peretz (translator)

Halina Poświatowska ; Selected And Translated By Maya Peretz ; Afterword By Anna Nasiłowska. Polish Original And English Translation.

Genres: Poetry, Poland, Polish Literature

233 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Halina Poświatowska (born Helena Myga) was a Polish poet and writer, one of the most important figures in modern Polish literature.

She is famous for her lyrical poetry and for her intellectual and passionate yet unsentimental poetry on the themes of death, love, existence, famous historical personages, especially women, as well as her mordant treatment of life, living, being, bees, cats and the sensual qualities of loving, grieving and desiring.

She died at 32 after a second heart operation to correct a heart defect that limited her mobility and breathing, which she acquired when she fell ill as a child during the World War II German occupation of Poland.

Source: wikiedia.com

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

with words
I complain of my torments
as if poetry were a key
which could open
the paradise slammed shut ages ago
*
To produce a poem — once a vibrating pain in the tissues was enough and
a stock of words no greater than an animal's scream. Nowadays, one needs
an outline and an argument, and comparative explorations into the depth
of dictionaries. There are surgical interventions around words, there
are word-hybrids, half-words, quarter-words, and there is an ambiguity
of letters swollen with wisdom. And my thirst — a fledgling nightingale
is silenced by all these scores and instruments. And when you ask me
for meaning, I feel how the branch that supports the frail nest snaps under
the crushing load of a grand piano.
*
and you grew distant
as the Milky Way
visible only at night
sleepless from the cold

[Hind · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like longing
climbing up the railings of sound and color
catching into my open mouth
the frozen scent 
I like my loneliness
suspended higher
than a bridge
embracing the sky with its arms
and my love
walking barefoot
over the snow

[Charlotte]

Sensual and sad. Love and death were the center of her poetry. Poswiatowska died very young of a heart defect. She met her young husband in a sanitorium where they were both recovering from heart surgery. He died soon after they were married. She grieved for him and for the loss of her own life, but her poetry is not sentimental or morose. In this collection she is, in effect, saying goodbye to herself. Haunting, original, and brave.

[Yalena · Rating 4 out of 5]

She establishes a poetic where the Other is always-already an object of longing even when they are present (e.g. “I covered your eyes not to see and not to feel the loneliness of my body blossoming with you”). This is essentially a poetics of the body (e.g. "I lack former tenderness for my body", "I have only this body", "like my body to yours", "I flay my body take out and examine all my insides I lay out separately desire yearning pain perfectly apolitical asocial I squat over the pile of flesh"). She writes naïvely and in a lazy way which is so often off-putting to me. But she writes with so much charm and this desperate, unsentimental vitality that you get the sense that she wrote because this was truly the only way she was able to live (“each time I feel like living I scream when life is leaving me I refuse to let go”).

[june · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

"share with me
the daily bread of my loneliness
fill with your presence
the absent walls
gild
the nonexistent window
be a door"

"boundless are the mines of metaphors
from sheer spite
their open abyss frightens darkness
and I want my life level
and I want my life low
I don't want deep
I don't want across
or alongside"

genius, pure genius. hello new woman poet to obsess and fixate to. simple diction, easy to grasp but when you grasp it you can't just seem to let go... her imagery: love, death, kisses, nature, cats—what's not to love? indeed, i love.

[hera · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Despite the passing of time Poświatowska is not forgotten by the readers, and in particular by girls. — Anna Nasiłowska”

i don’t like rating poetry but this one was too beautiful and evocative not to.

[Ella · Rating 5 out of 5]

share with me
the daily bread of my loneliness
fill with your presence
the absent walls
gild
the nonexistent window
be a door
above all a door
which can be thrown
wide open

[LoL · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dawno nic nie poruszyło tak mojej duszy, a jednocześnie dało poczucie takiego zrozumienia jak wiersze Haliny Poświatowskiej 🤍

[Muchomorek ☾ · Rating 5 out of 5]

jestem kościołem
ach jestem niewątpliwie gotyckim kościołem
z tym smukłym krwiobiegiem
w deszczu
uniesiona nad sobą
spragnionymi ustami
piję przestrzeń 🖤

[Móheiður Hlíf · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is possibly the one poetrybook I would take to a desert Island — beautiful somewhat painfully haunting. And yes so feminine in the most truest and positive way 💗

[Agnieszka Mauch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dlaczego tylko 3 gwiazdki? Poświatowska się powtarza. Jest to mało innowacyjne, męczące i nie wskazuje na to, żeby miał miejsce jakiś rozwój osobisty w tej kolekcji. Niektóre wiersze są fantastyczne, naprawdę ściskają serducho, a inne po prostu wieją nudą. Szczerze mówiąc, angielskie tłumaczenie bywa o niebo lepsze, niż oryginał. Przynajmniej angielski jest bardziej rozbudowany, jeśli chodzi o słownictwo.

Ale i tak polecam. Warto Poświatowską przeczytać.

[Mike Koen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll stand at the window — I'll look
wave my hand
flutter my handkerchief
bid farewell
alone in that window
and in summer
in crazy May
I will lie down on the grass
warm grass
and with my hands will touch your hair
and with my lips will touch a bee's pelt
prickly and beautiful
like your smile
like dusk
later it will be
silver — golden
perhaps golden and only red
for that dusk
that wind
which whispers love into grasses
stubbornly whispers love

[Bambi · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite poet, i cant believe how underrated she is, but im happy, delightful to have read such beautiful well put poems.