In 1940, a young girl is taken from her home in Eastern Poland to Arkhangelsk, Siberia; in 1942, she boards a train. Seventy years later, that journey is reimagined by her granddaughter, Zosia Kuczyńska. As Kuczyńska’s poems tell the story of her babcia, her maternal grandmother, coming to England, she confronts some of the big questions of art and history: how do you tell another person’s story without exploiting it? What’s at stake when we try make patterns out of the past, and can we ever leave those patterns behind?
Kuczyńska’s poems are both richly narrative and sharply attentive to the complexities of home and culture. They capture human endurance through the redrawing of political maps, from ‘the heat of Easter in Tehran’ to the powdered eggs and stocking shortages of the London Blitz.
Despre autor
Rachel Piercey is a poet and editor who also writes for children. Her poems have appeared in magazines including Magma, The Rialto, Poems In Which, Butcher’s Dog and The Poetry Review and she has two pamphlets with the Emma Press, The Flower and the Plough and Rivers Wanted. https://www.rachelpierceypoet.com/