Poet's Choice

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By Mary Karr

Sunday, September 14, 2008

I never stop wondering why my favorite poets of the previous century are Polish. When Nazi occupiers were replaced by equally brutal Stalinists, the cataclysm must have bled irony into the nation's poetry. Books by poets from the former Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, which also endured invasion, are sprinkled throughout my library, but only translations of Polish poetry make whole shelves sag.

Anna Kamienska is one lesser-known beauty from the generation that spawned Nobel laureates Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska. Skepticism pervades their work; Kamienska's sounds less sardonic, more desperate to make sense of random carnage. Her poem "The Return of Job" suggests how much worse survival can be than affliction.

Job didn't die

didn't throw himself under a train

didn't croak in a vacant lot

the chimney didn't spew him out

despair didn't finish him off

he arose from everything

from misery dirt

scabs loneliness

In the way people dust themselves off after tornadoes, Job kept on. But how ghastly his blessings must have seemed after his gargantuan losses.

. . . Job survived