Book Review

After World War II, multicultural Poland was forcibly rearranged. German speakers were expulsed from the West. Ukranians were evicted from the East. Ninety percent of the Jewish community—three million people—had already largely disappeared during the war period, subsumed by the Holocaust. When Bronisław Maj was writing his most famous poetry in the 1980s and 1990s, Poland was a reeling, ethnically-cleansed, and tightly-controlled satellite State of the USSR. The economy was in collapse and an authoritarian government had instituted martial law. Of his native Kraków, a UNESCO World Heritage Site known also a City of Churches and City of Saints, Maj writes,

The city

has slowly stripped itself of color, dressed

in a single layer of grime. Instead of air,

always fog, and in the fog someone speaks to me—

perhaps in Polish. I can make out

words, but I don’t understand the sense.

It has already crumbled.

The poet’s sacred task is to observe, absorb, and bear witness—but in this Maj was faced with a conundrum—how do you speak freely when free speech has been banned? How do you communicate with future generations when you know, for certain, that the shameful idiosyncrasies of your era mean you will be misunderstood and quite possibly despised for what you had to do to survive? About this Maj writes,

Who will bear witness to these times. Who

will write down? For it won’t be one of us.

We have lived here too long, absorbed

this age too deeply. We are too faithful

to speak the truth. To speak any truth at all.

Extinction of the Holy City: Selected Poems is a compilation of Bronisław Maj’s poetry, beautifully translated by Daniel Bourne and released by Parlor Press in 2024. As I read through this moving collection I thought, Maj is right about his era being misunderstood and forgotten. Three generations have matured since the Soviet Union fell, and our ideas about surveillance, diversity, and socio-economic class distinctions have changed dramatically since then. Still, I wonder how much the specificity of a particular time, like post-Stalin Poland, restricts the ability of outsiders to understand it. Might it not also be possible that specific circumstances, like a whittler following the grain, forces the topography of our true nature to emerge, and in doing so reveals a truth that is universally human?

I think that is much of what Maj strived for in the poems that make up this collection. In short lines and deceptively simple language, he taps our touchstones here, there, and here again, leading us through icy city streets and over squeaking snow, under whirling stars and down “the dark tunnel of poplars,” to meet us in a place where poet and reader, despite their different surface realities, understand each other perfectly. Or as Maj explains it,

I won’t cry out, make a show of my feelings.

I’ll only describe: an evening, the path, a cloud

of black crows and a train, everything

that was there at the time. The rest

doesn’t exist. It’s only a memory. Only

my memory. What happened inside

is not a fit subject for words.

And what does a poet do when his subject is not fit for words? Maj was unable to state plainly the events he witnessed—his most explicitly political poem, “Chile,” purports to describe Augusto Pinochet Ugarte’s totalitarian regime rather than Poland’s analogous one. Instead he explores the boundary of a human life and human reality. He describes the frustration of trying to find the right words, the right scene. He laments the near-impossibility of stretching observation beyond oneself when the sum total of the knowable is “the infinity that begins and ends with me.”

In imagining his future reader—perhaps someone in the faraway year of 2025—Maj writes,

Naïve, but that’s how I see you

in five, twenty, a hundred-twenty years as you read

this poem and think about me, from a generation

or a century ago. You wonder how it was

I lived. My life and times, the bottomless

weariness of people.

. . .

I have

so little to pass down, so little

just as everyone else. But I know

I lived and I don’t want to be completely erased—

to become for you another statistic

for pity or scorn.

Extinction of the Holy City draws from six published collections of Maj’s poetry. Most of the poems are short, less than twenty lines. And although each one leads beautifully into the next, the moment, vision, or idea that each evokes is so distinct and perfectly complete that you might—and this is my recommendation to you—choose to read them slowly, one per day like a morning meditation, leaving space and time for them to unfurl in you as the day rushes past like, as Maj describes it, “the train pounds / on its journeys while I stand at the window / with my face to the wet air.”