Become a Readings Member to make your shopping experience even easier. Sign in or sign up for free!

Become a Readings Member. Sign in or sign up for free!

Hello Readings Member! Go to the member centre to view your orders, change your details, or view your lists, or sign out.

Hello Readings Member! Go to the member centre or sign out.

Firebird
Paperback

Firebird

$38.99
Sign in or become a Readings Member to add this title to your wishlist.

Collected in English for the first time, these energetic, formally audacious poems by a recently rediscovered Polish writer are shining examples of art as resistance.

Zuzanna Ginczanka’s last poem Non omnis moriar, written shortly before her execution by the Nazis at the age of 27, is one of the most famous and unsettling texts in modern East European literature: using the lyric form of a Romantic testament and naming the person who betrayed her to the occupation authorities as a Jew, it exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of a national Polish culture based on exclusion and attempts to exorcise its demons through fierce irony.

Ginczanka, born in the Eastern Borderlands town of Rowne (Rivne), now in Ukraine, was encouraged by Warsaw’s doyen of poets, Julian Tuwim, to come to the capital, where her virtuoso wit, beauty and lyrical gifts made her an object of fascination and desire in the lively literary world of the interbellum. From the start, her poems tended to reverse traditional accounts of the relation of body to spirit, and to mock hypocrisy about sex, politics, and social identity.

Ginczanka’s linguistic exuberance and invention-reminiscent now of Tsvetaeva, now of Marianne Moore or Mina Loy-are as exhilarating as the passionate fusion of the physical world and the world of ideas she advocated in the single collection published during her lifetime, On Centaurs.

Read More
In Shop
Out of stock
Shipping & Delivery

$9.00 standard shipping within Australia
FREE standard shipping within Australia for orders over $100.00
Express & International shipping calculated at checkout

MORE INFO
Format
Paperback
Publisher
The New York Review of Books, Inc
Country
United States
Date
18 July 2023
Pages
88
ISBN
9781681377308

Collected in English for the first time, these energetic, formally audacious poems by a recently rediscovered Polish writer are shining examples of art as resistance.

Zuzanna Ginczanka’s last poem Non omnis moriar, written shortly before her execution by the Nazis at the age of 27, is one of the most famous and unsettling texts in modern East European literature: using the lyric form of a Romantic testament and naming the person who betrayed her to the occupation authorities as a Jew, it exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of a national Polish culture based on exclusion and attempts to exorcise its demons through fierce irony.

Ginczanka, born in the Eastern Borderlands town of Rowne (Rivne), now in Ukraine, was encouraged by Warsaw’s doyen of poets, Julian Tuwim, to come to the capital, where her virtuoso wit, beauty and lyrical gifts made her an object of fascination and desire in the lively literary world of the interbellum. From the start, her poems tended to reverse traditional accounts of the relation of body to spirit, and to mock hypocrisy about sex, politics, and social identity.

Ginczanka’s linguistic exuberance and invention-reminiscent now of Tsvetaeva, now of Marianne Moore or Mina Loy-are as exhilarating as the passionate fusion of the physical world and the world of ideas she advocated in the single collection published during her lifetime, On Centaurs.

Read More
Format
Paperback
Publisher
The New York Review of Books, Inc
Country
United States
Date
18 July 2023
Pages
88
ISBN
9781681377308