Customer Reviews

Gagarin Street: Poems

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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.

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.)

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.