Meadows of Memory: Poems and Prose by Lidia Kosk

Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka brings to life in English the magical realism in the poetry and prose of Poland's Lidia Kosk, entwining fairytale and real life, innocence of youth and instantaneous maturity, the horrors of war with the hope for peace. We are brought into a world unknown to many: rural Poland in the years immediately before, during, and after the Second World War. The audience learns of a girl's upbringing and the lust for life that she developed even before she confronted genocide and totalitarianism. This project is a labor of love, of stories and knowledge passed on between women, and across generations - in this book, from mother Lidia Kosk, to daughter Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka, and through her to the world at large.

About the Author :
Lidia Kosk, poet, writer, educator, lawyer, and photographer, is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose, and two anthologies. Her collaboration with her daughter, the poet and translator Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka, resulted in two bilingual volumes: Niedosyt/Reshapings (Oficyna Dziennikarzy i Literatów POD WIATR, 2003) and Slodka woda, slona woda/Sweet Water, Salt Water (ASTRA, 2009). The latter book has been translated into Japanese by Hiroko Tsuji and Izumi Nakamura, and published in Japan in 2016. Lidia collaborated with her husband, Henryk P. Kosk, on the two-volume Poland's Generals: A Popular Biographical Lexicon (Ajaks, 1998, 2001). Her most recent book is Szklana góra/Glass Mountain (Komograf, 2017), edited by Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka. The book comprises renditions of her poem "Szklana góra" in twenty-two languages, ranging from Arabic to Italian to Occitan to Russian, as well as to a work of visual art for the cover. The translators, hailing from several countries on three continents, were thrilled by the poem. Lidia's poem brought them all together to celebrate the power of poetry and connectedness throughout the world. Recently, music professor Sal Ferrantelli composed the score for "Szklana góra." The world premiere performance of the song by the soprano Laura Kafka-Price was in May 2019 at the Arts Club in Washington, DC. As was typical of her generation, Lidia Kosk came of age during World War II and survived first the Nazi occupation of Poland, and then the Stalinist regime imposed on Poland by the Soviet Union. Her poetry bears witness to history and at the same time is an affirmation of life. Lidia's poems and prose have been published in literary journals and anthologies in the USA, Poland, Russia and Japan; discussed and reviewed in English-, Polish- and Japanese-language publications; and featured on public radio in the USA and Poland, and in multimedia video presentations. In 2012, for Mother's Day, the National Public Radio station WYPR's The Signal broadcast a program featuring her, speaking from her Warsaw apartment, and her daughter-translator in the studio in Baltimore. Composer Philip A. Olsen translated a series of her poems into choral compositions and the McDonogh School choir has performed them in several countries, including the USA, Peru, Portugal, and Spain. Olsen's "Polish Triptych" comprising his three choral compositions to Danuta's translations of Lidia's poems premiered in Baltimore in May 2017. Lidia resides in Warsaw, Poland, where she leads literary workshops and a Poets' Theater (ATP). For more see: http: //gm.kosk.xyz/ and danutakk.wordpress.com/about-lidia-kosk/ Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka is the author of the prize-winning poetry collection Oblige the Light (CityLit Press, 2015) and Face Half-Illuminated (Apprentice House Press, 2015), a book of poems, translations, and prose. She is the translator for two bilingual books by Lidia Kosk, nominated for various translation prizes. Danuta has also edited two books, most recently Szklana góra/Glass Mountain, featuring Lidia Kosk's poem in twenty-two languages. Her English-language poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies in the USA and in several European countries. Likewise, her Polish-language poems have been published in Poland in Akcent and Więź, as well as in the US-based Przegląd Polski, the literary weekly supplement to the largest Polish-language daily in North America. Her poems were also featured in the NPR program "The Signal" during a joint interview with Lidia Kosk focused on her translations of Lidia's poetry. Over the years, in addition to Lidia Kosk, she went on to translate various Polish voices, including Ernest Bryll, author of numerous volumes of poetry, plays, and prose; Wislawa Szymborska, the 1996 Nobel laureate; and recently Marcin Świetlicki, a contemporary poet and musician, as well as Grzegorz Bialkowski, a poet and physicist. Since 1997, over seventy of her translations have appeared in the USA, in journals including Notre Dame Review, The Fourth River, Subtropics, and the Tupelo Press; in various anthologies; and on National Public Radio. Her translations have also gone in the other direction, from English to Polish, leading to the publication of her translations of three Maryland Poets Laureate-Lucille Clifton, Josephine Jacobsen, and Linda Pastan-in Poland in 2006. She is a founding member of DC-ALT (the Washington, DC area branch of the US national association of translators), which she has represented in events at the Writers' Center in Bethesda, MD, and at the Columbia Festival of Arts. She has organized and led translators' panels at the CityLit Festival at Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, in 2014; and at the Confluence: Translations in the Capital Area conferences at Montgomery College, in 2015 and 2017. Life in two languages, bridging the cultural divide between Poland and the United States, has allowed her the unique opportunity to translate poetry and to inhabit the distinctive worlds and linguistic idioms of those countries. At Loch Raven Review, as the editor of the poetry translations section, she has focused on bilingual publications, one language per issue. Since 2011 she has presented poets, and their English translators, representing 19 languages, as diverse as Portuguese, Contemporary Mayan, TItalian, Kurdish, Catalan, and most recently, Ukrainian and Arabic. Born and raised in Poland, she arrived in the USA in 1980, after receiving her PhD in biochemistry from the Polish Academy of Sciences. The imposition of martial law in her motherland on December 13, 1981, was the reason that she settled permanently in the USA. She resides in Catonsville, Maryland. For more information see http: //danutakk.wordpress.com. Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka is the author of the prize-winning poetry collection Oblige the Light (CityLit Press, 2015) and Face Half-Illuminated (Apprentice House Press, 2015), a book of poems, translations, and prose. She is the translator for two bilingual books by Lidia Kosk, nominated for various translation prizes. Danuta has also edited two books, most recently Szklana góra/Glass Mountain, featuring Lidia Kosk's poem in twenty-two languages. Her English-language poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies in the USA and in several European countries. Likewise, her Polish-language poems have been published in Poland in Akcent and Więź, as well as in the US-based Przegląd Polski, the literary weekly supplement to the largest Polish-language daily in North America. Her poems were also featured in the NPR program "The Signal" during a joint interview with Lidia Kosk focused on her translations of Lidia's poetry. Over the years, in addition to Lidia Kosk, she went on to translate various Polish voices, including Ernest Bryll, author of numerous volumes of poetry, plays, and prose; Wislawa Szymborska, the 1996 Nobel laureate; and recently Marcin Świetlicki, a contemporary poet and musician, as well as Grzegorz Bialkowski, a poet and physicist. Since 1997, over seventy of her translations have appeared in the USA, in journals including Notre Dame Review, The Fourth River, Subtropics, and the Tupelo Press; in various anthologies; and on National Public Radio. Her translations have also gone in the other direction, from English to Polish, leading to the publication of her translations of three Maryland Poets Laureate-Lucille Clifton, Josephine Jacobsen, and Linda Pastan-in Poland in 2006. She is a founding member of DC-ALT (the Washington, DC area branch of the US national association of translators), which she has represented in events at the Writers' Center in Bethesda, MD, and at the Columbia Festival of Arts. She has organized and led translators' panels at the CityLit Festival at Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, in 2014; and at the Confluence: Translations in the Capital Area conferences at Montgomery College, in 2015 and 2017. Life in two languages, bridging the cultural divide between Poland and the United States, has allowed her the unique opportunity to translate poetry and to inhabit the distinctive worlds and linguistic idioms of those countries. At Loch Raven Review, as the editor of the poetry translations section, she has focused on bilingual publications, one language per issue. Since 2011 she has presented poets, and their English translators, representing 19 languages, as diverse as Portuguese, Contemporary Mayan, TItalian, Kurdish, Catalan, and most recently, Ukrainian and Arabic. Born and raised in Poland, she arrived in the USA in 1980, after receiving her PhD in biochemistry from the Polish Academy of Sciences. The imposition of martial law in her motherland on December 13, 1981, was the reason that she settled permanently in the USA. She resides in Catonsville, Maryland. For more information see http: //danutakk.wordpress.com.

Review :
In Meadows of Memory Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka shows a poet's love and commitment, translating her own Mother's stories and poetry from Polish to English. She opens a portal for Lidia Kosk to cast a spell of folklore, fairytale and imagined worlds. Creativity is beauty in truth, and Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka makes another writer's inner values and humanity wonderfully available. This collaboration, with Mother Lidia Kosk seen through a daughter's prism, is realization and richness at once. --Grace Cavalieri, The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress Filled with lyricism and hard-won wisdom, this volume of poems and fable-like reminiscences of childhood and war boomerangs our way across decades and continents. What lands before us, "tossed like a prize," is a marvel of beauty that testifies to the incorruptibility of the human spirit. Lidia Kosk's pastoral portraits of "wind / horses / people," deftly translated from Polish by her daughter, exist in the liminal space between dream and reality, where we go to steady our thoughts. Like the human breath or the "strokes of the church clock / from a faraway tower," Kosk's words "organize time" and in doing so shed light on the human condition, including the moment when "birds fall silent / the human voice softens." If we, the readers who "look at the world from an upright position," ever find ourselves at the spot "where the train tracks end," let's hope it's with Meadows of Memory in our knapsacks. --Piotr Florczyk, author of East & West, translator of Building the Barricade by Anna Świrszczyńska These pieces, salvaged from the complexities of a life's long journey, cross borders of time and space, landscapes and loves. Their narratives invite us to witness to the wonderful imagination of a child who later becomes an adult experiencing feelings that "stream in from faraway times/ Shadows...in the meadows of remembrance." The works invite the question what is memory? as they "look at clouds like angel's wings / Still laden with yesterday's toils and tears." From a childhood on distant soil, through confusion and grief, survival and love, these pieces track the travels of an indomitable spirit and demonstrate ways that memory serves us as a "shield against forgetting." --Michael S. Glaser, Poet Laureate of Maryland 2004-2009 Poet Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka's deeply moving latest book, Meadows of Memory, delights the mind, heart, and senses with its masterly Polish-to-English translation of her mother's poems and stories dating from the start of what will be World War Two. Translation: 1. the act of putting words into a different language. 2. the act of moving a work from one form into another. In Meadows of Memory: Poems and Prose by Lidia Kosk, Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka has done both. As her daughter, Danuta knows Lidia's voice intimately--how it sounds in their native Polish, how it sounds spoken aloud. How it means. Thus the poems and stories embody an intimacy and immediacy which take them to the second definition: the translation of Lidia Kosk's voice into something the reader hears, feels, smells, touches. In the meadows is "a terrified bird" trembling "in the trapping hands," a "hare's terrified heartbeat." Over summer meadows was "a burning in the sky" proclaiming "there will be war." The two writers, mother and daughter, translate us directly--almost bodily--into those meadows' terror and beauty. --Clarinda Harriss, publisher of BrickHouse Books, Inc., author of Innumerable Moons