Selected Poems

by Czerniawski, Adam

• ISBN13: 9789057551062
• ISBN10: 9057551063
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-08-01
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Summary

Adam Czerniawski writes distinctive, challenging, and engaging poems, and since the late seventies has established himself as a significant presence in Polish poetry. Influenced by the remarkable international and multicultural experiences of his childhood, recounted in his memoir,Scenes from a Disturbed Childhood, Czerniawski poems show a profound concern with language, consciousness, experience, identity, and culture. In poem after poem Czerniawski debates, enacts or meditates obliquely on puzzles and questions of perception, memory, and representation, offering his readers the pleasures of watching a highly conscious and cultured Anglo-Polish-indeed, European-mind at work and play. A compact disc featuring readings of a selection of the poems in Polish and in English accompany this book. Adam Czerniawski was born in 1934 in Warsaw and left Poland in 1941. From 1941 to 1947 he lived in the Middle East. In 1947 he began his studies at the universities of London, Sussex, and Oxfo

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Series	xi
Introduction	xiii
Author's Note	xix
I
Pentagram:
World	2	(2)
Bridge	4	(2)
Fish	6	(2)
Triangle	8	(2)
Babylon	10	(2)
Teatro della guerra	12	(4)
A View of Delft	16	(8)
Concerning the Internal Contradictions of Classical Solid Geometry	24	(2)
Hunting the Unicorn	26	(2)
Mythology	28	(4)
Man	32	(2)
Science Fiction	34	(2)
Evening, or a Field of Vision	36	(2)
Transformation of Matter	38	(2)
Spring towards Evening	40	(2)
Paul Klee: A Gloss	42	(4)
II
Cape of False Hope	46	(2)
Petrol, or Life in Zarnowiec	48	(2)
Interior Topography	50	(2)
Knowledge by Description	52	(2)
Gaunilo's Island	54	(2)
Self-judgment	56	(2)
First Snow	58	(2)
Somewhere near Babylon	60	(2)
Incident in a Valley	62	(2)
Incident in a Temple	64	(2)
Incident in Heaven	66	(2)
Fragment	68	(2)
Listening to a Schubert Quartet	70	(2)
Knowledge and Experience	72	(2)
Oxford	74	(2)
Landscape with no King	76	(2)
Words and Dust	78	(4)
III
Poetry Lesson	82	(2)
Stripping	84	(2)
Last Poem	86	(2)
Discourse on Poetry	88	(12)
Lingua Adamica	100	(2)
The City Yesterday and Today	102	(2)
Cleaning an Old Poem	104	(4)
Babylon II	108	(2)
St Sebastian	110	(4)
From an Album	114	(2)
Family Portrait	116	(2)
Token of Remembrance	118	(4)
IV
Golden Age	122	(4)
Apparently in 1911	126	(2)
Seaside Holiday	128	(4)
You and I	132	(2)
Ode to Youth	134	(2)
Provocation	136	(2)
Broadstairs 1937	138	(2)
A Wasp in the Beer	140	(2)
Love	142	(2)
Infinitely	144	(2)
And the pleached medlars of Oxborough Hall	146	(2)
A Small Elegy Suddenly	148	(32)
V
From the sequence of Commentaries:
Ex libris	152	(2)
Girl at the Window	154	(2)
Words	156	(2)
Durobrivae, or Rochester	158	(4)
Desolation Sound, or the Voice of Despair	162	(4)
Ashurbanipal and Others	166	(4)
The Ages Speak, or what's new in History?	170	(4)
Death	174	(6)
VI
Sir David Ross lectures on Aristotle's Politics	180	(2)
Noise and a Definition	182	(2)
Bavaria 1956	184	(2)
Loop	186	(6)
At the End of the Twentieth Century	192	(4)
And above him the Moral Order of the Starry Heavens veiled for the moment by the sun's afterglow	196	(2)
Mirrors and Reflections	198	(20)
In the Order of an English Landscape	218	(2)
For the Muses' Return	220	(3)
List of poems on CD	223