The Municipal Public Library invites you to another evening of poetry and remembrance in the auditorium of Zgorzelec’s MDK on Wednesday, November 12, at 5:00 p.m..
Halina Poświatowska (1935–1967) is a beautiful and singular gem of 20th-century Polish poetry. Restricted by an incurable heart disease, she constantly fought for the right to live as fully and courageously as possible. An extraordinary hunger for love and knowledge, and a need for all forms of activity, colliding with the constant fear of suffering and sudden death, resulted in her finding her own creative path, poetics, and original way of communicating with the world. Her poems are characterized by great delicacy of language as well as courage and honesty in expressing her deepest desires.
***
I cannot do otherwise
inside the body
there is a cat bent with desire
calling for human hands
I soothe it with words
I lie
about strange colors and sounds
it drives round eyes
into the empty wall
it does not believe
it stretches
straightens its toes
it believes in nothing
and suddenly
all its bent claws
it drives into me
a deaf blind cat
Her oeuvre, created over little more than a decade, includes “Hymn bałwochwalczy” (1957), “Dzień dzisiejszy” (1963), “Oda do rąk” (1966), “Jeszcze jedno wspomnienie” (1968 – posthumously), and “Dzieła” (1997). In 1967, her autobiographical novel “Opowieść dla przyjaciela” was published.
Poświatowska remains present in the consciousness of poetry lovers; since 1974, a nationwide poetry competition dedicated to her has been held in her hometown of Częstochowa. Her work has also been discovered in other countries: in 2002, two titles were published in Germany, “Zawsze, gdy pragnę żyć” and “Opowieść dla przyjaciela”; in 2010, the collection of poems “Życie, umrę jeśli odejdziesz” was published in Persian, while “Jeszcze jedno wspomnienie” was published in Brazil in Portuguese. The poetry collection “Umiem tylko kochać” (comprising poems in Polish and Bulgarian) was published in Bulgaria.
The short but intense life and work of Halina Poświatowska have already been written about by Małgorzata Szulczyńska, Mariola Pryzwan, and Grażyna Borkowska. The biography by Kalina Błażejowska was published by Znak on May 19, 2014, providing further evidence of the continued relevance and universality of this poetry.
Marek Żytomirski, Zgorzelec Municipal Public Library/ii