This essay explores a body of 340 poems created by political prisoners who were accused of and imprisoned for anti-state activity in late 1940s and 1950s Stalinist Poland. Evaluating prison poetry as a historical source, I understand the process of composing a poem as the result of a prisoner’s need to document the world around her/himself, as a psychological activity that contained diffi cult prison experiences, as a negotiation of emotional and often conflicting states, and as a social practice through which prison poets affected themselves and the people around them. Situated somewhere at the intersection of the personal and political, poetry became one of the most powerful sites of resistance. In addition to evaluating prison poetry as a historical source, this essay also explores gender differences and similarities in the body of 340 poems discussed here and in the social function of the prison poems.
Neslihan Ekmekçioğlu
Aemilia Bassano Lanier was one of the first women in early modern England who claimed a professional poetic voice of her own by publishing her poem Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum in 1611. According to Lynette McGrath, her poetry could be regarded
Adam Rounce
The Complete Poems of William Empson edited by John Haffenden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000) ISBN 0713992875 £30.00
Norman Cameron: His Life, Work and Letters by Warren Hope (London: Greenwich Exchange, 2000) ISBN 187155105 6 £20.00
Antony Rowland and Tadeusz Pióro
Tadeusz Borowski’s poetry is virtually unknown in Britain and America, despite the fact that the Polish writer was a poet long before he wrote his controversial stories about his experiences in Auschwitz–Birkenau and Dachau. These stories, a selection of which appear in Penguin’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, ensured his canonical status in twentieth-century European literature. Yet only three Borowski poems are readily available in English translations: ‘Night over Birkenau’, ‘The Sun of Auschwitz’ and ‘Farewell to Maria’ are printed in Hilda Schiff’s anthology Holocaust Poetry. A few more appear in the English translation of Adam Zych’s anthology The Auschwitz Poems,3 but this edition is currently out of print.
Hugh Underhill
Life as It Comes by Anthony Edkins (Bradford: Redbeck Press, 2002) ISBN 0946980969 £6.95
The Soldier on the Pier by Brian Waltham (Calstock: Peterloo Poets, 2002) ISBN 1871471990 £7.95
Craeft: Poems from the Anglo-Saxon by Graham Holderness (Nottingham: Shoestring Press, 2002) ISBN 1899549676 £7.50
The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems by Peter Robinson (Tonbridge: Worple Press, 2002) ISBN 095394774 £8
‘Tu Numeris Elementa Ligas’
The Consolation of Nature’s Numbers in Parlement of Foulys
C.W.R.D. Moseley
More than once, Chaucer shows he is aware of his poems operating in two not necessarily convergent modes. Troilus and Criseyde (T&C ) often addresses the plural, listening audience presumed in ‘… Wherever thou art herde, or elles songe…’ (V. 1797
In Critical Survey
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2017
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 86–113 (28 total)
Mohamed Assaf and Kate Clanchy
These poems were not, as their elegiac, melancholic tone seems to imply, written by a 60-something exile remembering his childhood, but by a small Syrian boy with a grubby collar and a large football, named Mohamed Assaf. He is not an easy
Ursula Rudnick, Marc Saperstein, and Jonathan Magonet
. A.C. Jacobs, Nameless Country: Selected Poems , edited by Merle Bachman and Anthony Rudolf, Carcanet Press Ltd, 2018, £12.99 In some ways this is an easy book to review. Arthur (A.C.) Jacobs (1937–1994) has already received recognition as a poet