Sylwia Ejmont
The choice implied in the title of Krystyna Lenkowska’s latest volume can be understood in a variety of ways, too many for this brief introduction to explore without shortchanging them in the attempt. As you read the poems written by the author of “Eve’s Choice,” you will undoubtedly wonder what can be learned by looking at the post- lapsarian world through the eyes of that archetypal woman. Lenkowska’s poetic lens turns inwardly to probe deep inside a woman’s heart, but its searching gaze also shows us the world as it is reflected – contained, perhaps – in the mirror of her mind. Such poetry rings particularly feminine, and without too much bitterness or vituperation, feminist. Lenkowska’s Eve is painfully aware of her separation from and her opposition to Adam, whom she observes with a mixture of longing, indignation, and occasionally a shade of pity. The epigraph of the volume, a quote from Czesław Miłosz’s “Theological Treatise,” tells us that “Eve turned out to be a delegate of Nature and pulled Adam down into a monotonous wheel of births and deaths. Thence perhaps man’s fear before the promise of love, which is no different than the promise of death.” 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, Ró o “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. In lingering lovingly on the fragile beauty of the carnal, she invites us to mourn the inexorable temporality of all things human. Thus, “the millennial goose slowly being killed by a man wearing a cap,” the cat who watches the ritual sensually, together with each one of us constitute mere “cannon fodder” as we go through the motions of our daily routine. The poet entreats us to slow down, take a good look at ourselves and at those around us, to capture the moment in its tragic singularity before it flees from our consciousness and escapes our memory forever.
This kind of poetic vision is most fittingly expressed in Lenkowska’s own words, succinctly laid out in the poem titled Lekcja oprawy “The Framing Lesson.” Lenkowska anchors the concrete situation of viewing paintings at a gallery in Przemysl described in the piece to a specific geographic location, pegging it to a single moment in time. That makes it possible for the paintings to “look at her with their whole faces,” just as she takes them in squarely and with undivided attention. Each painting, much in the way of a poem, contains “the world of one moment” focused like a tunnel of light connecting the eye of the beholder to the object of observation. The “momentariness” of this act of looking and reflecting provides the organizational discipline of artistic vision. Precariously balanced on the very crest of the “wave of passing,” desperately “holding on to time,” the poetic persona endures in a state of extreme tension as if frozen into a single painted image enclosed within tight frames. Even her breath is withheld in order to avoid all distraction and possibly “overlook the irretrievable.” When translated onto the domestic scene, this process creates a “home gallery” with series of “momentary worlds in frames suitable for each occasion.” The frames contain mental pictures of memorable scenes, those touchingly mundane and familiar – “a table, a red tablecloth with a burned hole, your arm up to the elbow” – and those verging on the sublime – “you in the door like the apostle Peter or Philip.”
A leisurely stroll through Krystyna Lenkowska’s private gallery in “Eve’s Choice” will indeed yield many pleasures to the curious eye of an attentive reader.
Sylwia Ejmont