Sacred and Scared

Poetry. "Counterpointing scenes from Poland to California, from village to city, family to politics, WWII to the present, this amazing book creates a vision of grace and redemption in the face of a world often gone insane. To find its moments of grace requires a rare vision and poetic power, and Gregorek certainly possesses that. In one poem a priest is killed, his body thrown into 'the river we drink from, ' creating a simultaneous sense of communion and horror. But blunt reality is never denied, as with the woman who was 'walked for some minutes into the nearby forest / where a hole was already dug.' Yet in the midst of a world where memories can 'scratch' at one's soul, Gregorek creates lyrical and evocative moments that transcend everything, for this is a poet who can observe how 'inside me now / there is this rain / of trees.' This compelling book is more than a witness--it is transformative."--Richard Jackson

About the Author :
Jerzy Gregorek earned an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 1998. His poems and translations have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Ashville Poetry Review, Blueline, Forward, International Poetry Review, The Poetry Miscellany, and other publications. In 1997, Tennessee University Press published Late Confession, a chapbook of his translations of poems by Józef Baran. In 1998, he served as a guest editor and translator for a special edition of Shirim: A Jewish Poetry Journal. Subtitled "Polish Jewish Poets Between the Wars," the entire magazine was devoted to the writings of 11 Jewish poets who were murdered, committed suicide or who vanished during the Holocaust. He returned to Shirim in 2004 to serve as a guest editor for an entire issue devoted to the work of Maurycy Szymel, who vanished without a trace in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941. Jerzy's poem "Family Tree" was the winner of Amelia magazine's Charles William Duke Longpoem Award in 1998. In 2000, Jerzy co-translated with his wife, Aniela, three books by Polish contemporary poets: In a Flash by Józef Baran and Watermarks by Boguslaw Żurakowski (Cross-Cultural Communications), in addition to Her Miniature by Leszek Czuchajowski (Arcana Publishing). The same year, he was invited to do a reading at the United Nations with fellow poets Stanley Kunitz, Gerald Stern, and Henry Taylor. In a Flash was one of four finalists for the PEN USA West 2001 Literary Award. In 2002, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Jerzy a literature fellowship to support the translation from Polish into English of selected poems by Maurycy Szymel, a project on which Jerzy collaborated with Aniela.