Gagarin Street: Poems [Paperback]

Piotr Gwiazda (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 8, 2005

Poetry. Selected for The Montserrat Review's Best Picks for Poetry 2005, GAGARIN STREET offers an edgy and disquieting meditation on the intersection of private and public history. "These poems remind us how easily the Gagarin Streets of our youth may disappear, and of the poet's vital task to re-inscribe them for the future's fellow travelers"--Mark Nowak. Piotr Gwiazda teaches modern and contemporary poetry at University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Editorial Reviews

Review

While filling in the lines of a victim who must live on as his origins fall away, GAGARIN STREET shows us that much remains indistinct in that ever growing blank. But if as Gwiazda attests in his most hopeful moments vacancy is the mother of creation, that blank may yet yield new life, or at least something human. --Jacket

Gwiazda demonstrates a mythopoetic instinct capable of shattering isolaton, and an ability to play with language that may create worlds as yet unimagined. --Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing

In GAGARIN STREET we encounter a poetic mind engaged in the long process of coming to terms with the after-shock of a collapsed world. It gives us a sense of what it might have felt for those around the Italian peninsula after the sack of Rome. There is a mental agility that comes with the despair of losing the known and the twinge of hope in looking ahead. --Book/Mark: Small Press Quarterly Review

From the Publisher

A debut volume by a Polish-American poet, this book offers an edgy and disquieting meditation on the intersection of private and public history. Gaylord Brewer says: "From the title poem of Piotr Gwiazda’s impressive debut collection, a recurring theme announces itself: altered history and the poet’s qualified attempts at recognition, if not full reclamation. Over and over, we follow along haunted streets real and imagined, sharing our guide’s disorientation as the excavated past offers little clue to the future. Names have been changed, but not to protect the innocent. This book is full of terrific, lively poems I wish I had written." Poems included in this volume appeared in many journals, including Barrow Street, Columbia, Drunken Boat, Hotel Amerika, Margie, Rattle, The Southern Review, Talisman, and Washington Square.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 68 pages
• Publisher: Washington Writers' Publishing House; 1st edition (October 8, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0931846803
• ISBN-13: 978-0931846809
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,571,624 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Half Czeslaw Milosz and Half William Burroughs, June 28, 2011

By 

John Guzlowski (Danville, VA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gagarin Street: Poems (Paperback)

I've been writing about the writers of the Polish Diaspora for a while now, and what always brings me pleasure is the realization of how many fine writers and artists there are who share a Polish background.

Recently, I've met one of these writers online. His name is Piotr Gwiazda, and he came to the US from Poland in 1991. He's a reviewer, a translator, a university professor, and a poet.

His recent book Gagarin Street has the creative energy that I've seen in writers like Milosz, Szymborska, and Herbert. Gwiazda's book -- combining nostalgia and apocalyptic visions -- offers us a vision of a disappearing world folding in upon itself. It's like nothing else I've seen since William Burroughs.

You've got to take a look at Gwiazda's poems. Here's the opening of the title poem:

GAGARIN STREET

When I was a child I lived on Gagarin Street.
Today it's called Pilsudski Street.
Ten years ago the sun rose, a little wind blew, a little bird sang,
a little empire fifty kilometers away
fell, and so did its heroes: Lenin, Dzerzhinsky,
Bierut. This one, though, makes you pause for a moment
after his lonely voyage in spinning Vostok
after his tumble from orbit, his fifty-fifty chance of survival.
After all, he was our hero--this they taught us
in middle school--"our" meaning all of us, all of the world.
Not so. Today his space-suit rots
in a museum basement, his Russian face with Soviet smile
disappears from history textbooks, his round-the-globe celebrity
revoked (unanimously) by a municipal
subcommittee.

5.0 out of 5 stars Provokes deep thought at the changing nuances of personality and environment with the passage of time, July 10, 2006

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gagarin Street: Poems (Paperback)

Gagarin Street is a debut collection of free-verse poems by Polish-born author Piotr Gwiazda (Asst. Prof. of English, Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County), about personal disorientation among the streets of history that may or may not have taken place. Bridging the hypothetical and the mythical into a word where secrets are revealed piece by piece, Gagarin Street provokes deep thought at the changing nuances of personality and environment with the passage of time. "Four Autobiographies": 1) I tried to write it down: // how I abandoned the sinking ship, / washed up on the indifferent shore / among people whose words I couldn't understand, / though I had mastered every language of the world. // (See it's already distorted.)

4.0 out of 5 stars Poems of tension, apocalypse, and solace, February 23, 2006

By 

Matthew Poland (LaVale, MD United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Gagarin Street: Poems (Paperback)

I'll start this review by admitting my bias: Piotr Gwiazda is one of my professors, and a very good one at that, so I'm of course inclined to be kind to him. Fortunately, his poetry is very deserving. Apocalyptic imagery runs throughout, and Gwiazda captures a peculiar (but all too familiar in the era of 24-hour news) disconnection from it. More than anything tension pervades these poems - tension between past and present, public and private, self and projections of self, expectation and result. That is not to say there is not some levity, though; he more than once invites the reader, as in one of my favorites, "Canticle," to relax and "have a drink." These poems do seem to find solace in language, however - in my favorite poem of the collection, "July," the poet describes how he "survived on bread and Tolstoy." Language, it seems, is what keeps the poet connected to an alienating world.