{"id":693,"date":"2010-05-28T08:07:10","date_gmt":"2010-05-28T08:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=693"},"modified":"2010-05-28T08:07:10","modified_gmt":"2010-05-28T08:07:10","slug":"ken-head-reviews-snow-calling-by-agnieszka-studinska","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/ken-head-reviews-snow-calling-by-agnieszka-studinska\/","title":{"rendered":"Ken Head reviews 'Snow Calling' by Agnieszka Studinska"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/span>Snow Calling<\/span> <\/span>by<\/span> Agnieszka Studzinska
<\/span>Salt Publishing<\/a> 2010<\/span> <\/span>
ISBN:978 – 1 – 84471 – 559 – 6 Hardback:  \u00a312.99 45pp<\/span>

\u201cI was going to say something, \/ and stopped\u201d.  Polish-born Agnieszka Studzinska\u2019s choice, for the epigraph to her interesting and intriguing first collection, of these deceptively straightforward words from Irish poet Thomas Kinsella\u2019s poem 'Ancestor', provides an early indicator as to how the entire collection may best be read.  In common with Kinsella\u2019s New Poems 1973<\/span>, from which 'Ancestor' comes, Snow Calling<\/span> also contains poems concerned with sharply focused, clear-eyed recollections of the past and, as in Holding,  Studzinska\u2019s preoccupation with what commentators on Kinsella\u2019s work have described as \u201cblood and family\u201d:  \u201cI look at your hands \/ your tiny fingers gripping my thumb, \/ hard to imagine them touching \/ someone else rather than me \/ or holding the way I held \/ your father that night \u2013 \u201d.  The notion of being about to say something and then stopping, however, suggests rather more than simple tact or reticence about sex, a sense, perhaps, of the need to hesitate or pause and think again before committing to words, a conviction that too much clarity over-simplifies, or that words, in the final analysis, \u201ccan\u2019t help but pull apart \/ the very thing in front of me \/ as if to punish.\u201d  Clearly, for Studzinska, poetry is neither entertainment nor a beautiful alternative to living:<\/span>

\u201cI don\u2019t miss home, just the mountains,<\/span>
in the beginning I could see the mountains<\/span>
in rows of chimneys, that was enough \u2013 <\/span>
I still consider myself a visitor.\u201d<\/span>

Despite a degree of apparent clarity, then, Studzinska\u2019s poems remain in other ways challengingly elusive and enigmatic.  They are sparse, offer little by way of context, plunge straight into seriousness without preamble, are sometimes structurally demanding for the reader in terms of the arrangement of words and lines on the page and leave much either unsaid or in the hands of imagery that ranges with great precision from the delicate \u201csnow light at an angle saying more than we can\u201d to the  brutally direct \u201cpeople shredded like wood\u201d.  Throughout, it is hard to avoid the sense that this is a poet for whom every word matters, who mistrusts easy revelation and struggles against it, a quality found also, it seems to me, in the writing of the fine Belgian poet Miriam Van hee, with whose work Studzinska\u2019s may well bear comparison.  The closing line of her seven-part poem 'Haunting', quoted from the work of Joe Bousquet, a French writer and poet badly injured during World War 1 and left paralysed for life, serves to make the point well:  \u201cI am my own hiding place\u201d.  Yes indeed.  To borrow poet and critic Dennis O\u2019Driscoll\u2019s comment on Kinsella, reading your way towards an understanding of the complex interior of Studzinska\u2019s poetic life as explored in Snow Calling<\/span> is like letting your eyes adjust to the dark in a cinema.<\/span>

That said, however, and despite W. H. Auden\u2019s view that poetry derives from the human instinct to play, serious poems, as Studzinska\u2019s most certainly are, do make something happen, something that matters to the reader\u2019s (and the writer\u2019s) heart, to their consciousness of being human.  We are, after all, the only creatures in our world possessed of self-knowledge, the capacity to meditate upon our own predicament and the courage to live with what we learn:<\/span>

\u201cA stopping at an edge \u2013 <\/span>
sensing a world of minerals, mistakes, the molecules of air,<\/span>

water, the width and breadth of love, a vacancy \u2013<\/span>
this singular moment in its spectrum of sadness,<\/span>

where are we in this immeasurable opening?\u201d<\/span>

<\/font><\/p>\n

.….Reviewed by Ken Head<\/span><\/span><\/font>
<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Snow Calling by Agnieszka Studzinska Salt Publishing 2010 ISBN:978 – 1 – 84471 – 559 – 6 Hardback:  \u00a312.99 45pp\u201cI was going to say something, \/ and stopped\u201d.  Polish-born Agnieszka Studzinska\u2019s choice, for the epigraph to her interesting and intriguing first collection, of these deceptively straightforward words from Irish poet Thomas Kinsella\u2019s poem 'Ancestor', provides […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}