Krystyna Lenkowska

Stéphane D'Amour, Montréal, Canada, February 2014

I read your book with great pleasure. I was glad to find in many poems that abstract quality that has come to embody Polish poetry's signature over the years.

Anna Janko - Afterword to the book "An Overdue Letter to a Pimply Angel" (2014) translated by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough

There is something in these poems which – despite their apparent simplicity – makes them get under one’s skin, where they begin to complicate themselves, acquire non- verbal values and even descend into madness. We don’t sense all that when we read them the way we read everything. . . We can undoubtedly appreciate the intellectual quality of this poetry, take in its subtle and by no means feminine emotions, discover its linguistic schemes and their shadows, and beneath the restrained narration discern a certain implicit lushness of its second plane. . .

Sabahudin Hadžialić, Sarajevo 21.03.2013

The effect is that we pause at the end of the line without finishing a complete phrase, sounding as if we are short of breath or being "strangled," by material evidence just as the author is. So the meaning is confusing syntactically, but lucid sonically.

Paul Scott Derrick, January 2013

Keats' negative capability fluidly inserts itself into the Cityscape of Rome in "The Eye of John Keats in Rome" by Krystyna Lenkowska. The poem projects a poet going into the mind of a poet going into the mind of the surrounding world. The translator of the poem from Polish into English has clearly done a very good job.

Paul Scott Derrick
Universitat de Valencia, Spain

The dexterity with which she jumps from one image to another can be breathtaking, as can the sheer beauty of her language.
(Steve Yarbrough, writer) ... m o r e

Krystyna Lenkowska has managed to achieve what is pursued by all consciously creative writers: her own unique diction.
(Janusz Szuber) ... m o r e

the ending of 'Epiphany' caught me off guard. the vulnerability expressed in the poem is nice. real. immediate.mine.
(erik burns, poet, actor, teacher, Toronto, Canada)

John Guzlowski (American poet and retired university professor of literature)

I was very much impressed by the poems, especially Flatfish and A Man Wearing a Cap. Both were extraordinary, but A Man Wearing a Cap was especially so. It's strong images and it's apparent simplicity were elements that spoke to me. A Man Wearing a Cap reminded me of the poems of one of my favorite Polish poets, Tadeusz Rosewicz. You have the same willingness to face a world gone wrong, and smile
..........
I enjoyed "Eve's Choice" very much. Especially "Fragility," "Conversation about Snow," "For the New Century," "They Come They Go." Your voice sounds like it has the kind of authority that comes from several thousand years of close observation of what we do to each other and what we feel when we feel. You could be Sappho or some Roman woman writing poems in the 5th century AD and sealing them up in jars so they can be buried behind the house. I like the world of your poems: the snow, the oak trees, the fir trees, train stations and museums, shops and bathtubs. The fingers that are like spring twigs that are like Edith Piaf. I really enjoyed the book and your voice, and look forward to reading the other book.
(John Guzlowski)

This collection, without doubt, will be well received by readers who can discern and contemplate the fragile interior of the poems included in Eve's Choice Their author, Krystyna Lenkowska, has earlier published four collections of poetry, but like the American poets Anne Sexton and Amy Clampitt, she had a late debut. However, given the publishing situation in Poland , her debut may well have happened at the right time.
(Marzena Broda) ... m o r e

Introduction to Krystyna Lenkowska's reading in Ann Arbor, Univeristy of Michigan (May 8, 2005), published in NOWA OKOLICA POETÓW, no 17 (2/2005)

Lenkowska's poetry, almost heartbreakingly intimate and quotidian, engages critically with this pronouncement by demonstrating that the wheel of births and deaths is anything but monotonous. Poems like Pochodnio, Różo "O Torch, O Rose" or Dzika "Wild" assert the power and the mystique of the feminine, poised somewhere between the irresistibly sensual and the ecstatically dangerous. Who are you, asks the poetic voice half-baffled by the question itself - "holy adulteress, bloody Lady Macbeth, wreath of thorns," poisonous "hemlock," or "perhaps life itself"?
In other poems, life is both precious and fragile, flaring upwards like a strong flame, then flickering low when its fire has been spent. In that sense, Lenkowska's work ponders not only the secrets of Eve, but more universally the mystery of individual human existence caught in the cycles of renewal, passing, and extinction.
(Sylwia Ejmont) ... m o r e

Introduction to Krystyna Lenkowska's Poetry Reading at California State University , Fresno by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough (April 28, 2005)

Krystyna Lenkowska belongs alongside those Polish women poets who like the young poets of the sixties generation believe in the poetic imagination and in the personal superseding the public. Although the publication of her first book of poetry coincided with the "Barbarian" anthology, generationally, philosophically, and aesthetically she's closer to the poets born after the end of the second world war. Like the poetry of other women poets, her poems display existential and literary self-awareness, as well as wry humor and irreverence. At the same time her poetic voice is uniquely her own. One reviewer of her previous collection said "The critic who will try to point out [Lenkowska's] artistic (and also generational) affinities . . . most probably won't find them." The woman in Lenkowska's poems is a modern woman who feels affinity with other women in myth, art, history; a woman who is not shy about her sensuality, who doesn't feel that she needs to make amends, but who often painfully feels her loneliness. Yet without this sense of separateness she wouldn't be able to create her own interior space. And without others she wouldn't know her loneliness and her desire for togetherness. Krystyna Lenkowska's poems are personal but never confessional. Even in the poems with concrete locales and details, the speaking "I" isn't particularized. There's distance and elusiveness.
(Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough, "Desire for separateness and desire for togetherness are not contradictory") ... m o r e

(.) Lenkowska's poetry is original, imaginative, and "quintessentially feminine." The rich legacy of Polish poetry, including the work of Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska and Zbigniew Herbert, has left an indelible imprint on Lenkowska (...) But she also consciously sets out to do something different. She's drawn to different subject matter (.). There's much more of an edge of contemporary experience". (.)
(Steve Yarbrough, an endowed professor of Creative Writing, prose writer, prizewinner of California Book Award and Pushcart Prize, recently nominated to Pen-Faulkner Prize, FRESNO NEWS, California State University, USA, April 2005)