Afterword

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.

Eve’s Choice opens in an interesting way: with the recollection of an angel fleeing a Christmas tree to travel around the Earth. Together with him we learn the basic principles that govern the Earth: birth, love, death. Lenkowska’s angel is also the speaker’s pimply and awkward first lover, in whom she confides her feelings, her thoughts, and her past.

Lenkowska’s poems are neither formal nor abstract. They are distinctive. The thought in them is lucid, and this lucidity results in refined, elegantly written verse. Sonnets, sestinas, villanelles are absent here, but there are no superfluous words, no false notes, no affectation.

Although she’s focused on her own world, Krystyna Lenkowska doesn’t annex the reader’s space. On the contrary, she leaves ajar the door to her own world in which there is a woman, a man, and a home filled with closeness flowing in two separate currents. The boundaries of their roles are clearly defined, but the man barely forms the background for the woman whose love equals death.

The axis linking the poems in Eve’s Choice is transience which the author approaches in a striking way. “The dead are overgrown with names, lips, hands. / You can’t die without them. / (. . .) It’s difficult to imagine a country where they don’t exist.” Or “The intricate world of shapes and designs, like an eccentric’s treasury / above the surface of noise. / Like the stillness of flowers in winter gardens.” My feeling is that the persona of these poems sneaks adroitly among the crumbs of life, noticing the details that make it up.

Crows scratch in the heaps of dirt.
Frost hangs here dense like time. The fog walls off murky spaces.
Uncertain light dawns – cheap neon lights.
I measure its growling or flickering. The silence rings.

No way to shuck sound.
No way to shuck light (. . .).

Immersion in detail may be a strength in poetry if through detail one discovers some new quality in familiar situations and objects. Lenkowska accomplishes that without resorting to shouting, brutality or physiology. Her poems are unpretentious and well-made, their emotions reined in. I find that quality as appealing as her sense of humor and her irony, which show her distance from the world and from herself. The end result is poetry that is interesting, carefully tuned and resounding in different keys, each connected to Krystyna Lenkowska’s miniature worlds, which are governed by the time that we all share. According to its rules these poems can seem anything but alien to us.

Marzena Broda