cover image Young Poets of a New Poland: An Anthology

Young Poets of a New Poland: An Anthology

. Forest Books, $0 (254pp) ISBN 978-1-85610-010-6

Like the society which produces it, contemporary Polish verse is experiencing an identity crisis. With the fall of the Communist regime in the 1980s, traditional subjects of Polish poetry--witness and protest--vanished. The poets of ``a new Poland'' instead confront subject matter their Western colleagues have struggled with for years: commonplace daily life. A return to the self as center of poetic effort forms the touchstone of this new poetry. Pirie's anthology catalogues this shift in focus forced on Polish poets born in the '50s and '60s. Predictably, the older of the ``young'' writers tend to describe themselves within historical contexts; a remembered childhood repatriation, for example. The generation of poets in their twenties, however, gravitates toward more insular and philosophical verse. Though generally an interesting glimpse of an emerging body of literature, Young Poets exhibits many growing pains: a tendency to over-romanticize the cafe experience, and an often clumsy reach for exotic images. Two notable writers: Urszula Benka and Katarzyna Borun. (July)