Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, September 14, 2008; BW12

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

washed his body of blood sweat pus

and lay down in his own house again

New friends were already gathering

a new wife was breathing new love into his mouth

new children were growing up with soft hair

for Job to touch with his hands

But this Job can endure his losses more easily than he can God's offer of a new life with abundance:

Wouldn't it be better for you Job

to rot in a lost paradise with the dead

than to wait now for their nightly visit

they come in dreams they envy you life

Wouldn't it be better happy Job

to remain dirt since you are dirt

The pustules washed off your hands and face

ate through your heart and liver

You will die Job

Wouldn't it be better for you

to die with the others

in the same pain and mourning

than to depart from this new happiness

You walk in the dark

wrapped in darkness

among new people

useless as a pang of conscience

You suffered through pain

now suffer through happiness

Excerpts from "The Return of Job" by Anna Kamienska are from "Astonishments: Selected Poems of Anna Kamienska." © 2007. Used by permission of Parclete Press.

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."