Głosy Voices - A Bilingual Edition

Jan Polkowski

Publisher: Glagoslav Publications B.V. (N)

Summary

In December 1970, amid a harsh winter and an even harsher economic situation, the ruling communist regime in Poland chose to drastically raise prices on basic foodstuffs. Just before the Christmas holidays, for example, the price of fish, a staple of the traditional Christmas Eve meal, rose nearly 20%. Frustrated citizens took to the streets to protest, demanding the repeal of the price-hikes.
 
Things took an especially dramatic turn in the northern regions near the Baltic shore — later, the cradle of the Solidarity movement, which would eventually spark the fall of communism in Poland and throughout Central and Eastern Europe — where the government moved against their citizens with the Militia and the Army. Forty-one Poles were murdered by their own government when militiamen and soldiers opened fire with live rounds on the crowds in Gdańsk, Gdynia, Szczecin and Elbląg.
 
Jan Polkowski’s moving poetic cycle Głosy [Voices], presented here in its entirety in the English translation of C.S. Kraszewski, is a poetic monument to the dead, their families, and all who were affected by the ‘December Events,’ as they are sometimes euphemistically referred to. In his afterword to the collection, ‘Jan Polkowski’s Voices — The Antigones of the Baltic Coast,’ Józef Maria Ruszar notes that this work, in which Polkowski, as something of a medium, ‘enters the skin’ of the dead, the survivors, and their families to ‘speak from within his narrators,’ is something which ‘has no counterpart in the literature of Poland — or even that of the world.’
 
In its moving, subtle, yet powerful tribute to those who paid the highest price for the ultimate victory of right over wrong, liberty over oppression, Jan Polkowski’s Voices takes its rightful place alongside other immortal artistic threnodies, such as Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, John Hersey’s Hiroshima, and Henry Górecki’s Symphony III.

Available since: 10/30/2021.

Poetry & Theatre

Other books that might interest you

Yellow Rain - Poems

Mai Der Vang

In this staggering work of documentary and poetry, Mai Der Vang reopens a wrongdoing that deserves a new reckoning. As the US abandoned them at the end of the Vietnam War, many Hmong refugees recounted stories of a mysterious substance that fell from planes during their escape from Laos in the mid-1970s. This substance, known as "yellow rain," caused severe illnesses and thousands of deaths. These reports prompted an investigation into allegations that a chemical biological weapon had been used against the Hmong in breach of international treaties. A Cold War scandal erupted, wrapped in partisan debate around chemical arms development versus control. American scientists argued that yellow rain was the feces of honeybees defecating en masse—still held as the widely accepted explanation. The truth of what happened to the Hmong, to those who experienced and suffered yellow rain, has been ignored and discredited.Integrating archival research and declassified documents, Vang calls out the erasure of a history, the silencing of a people who at the time lacked the capacity and resources to defend and represent themselves. In poems that sing and lament, that contend and question, Vang restores a vital narrative in danger of being lost, and brilliantly explores what it means to have access to the truth and how marginalized groups are often forbidden that access.

Show book

Memorial Verses and L'Envoi

James Russell Lowell

This is the third part of the collected poems of James Russell Lowell, comprising his Memorial Verses and his celebrated poem L'Envoi. - Summary by Carolin

Show book

Arrrowsmith - Hollywood Stage

Hollywood Stage Productions

Hollywood is indelibly printed in our minds as the ‘go-to’ place for entertainment and has been for decades.  When there really did seem to be more stars in Hollywood than in Heaven Hollywood Stage had them performing films as radio plays – on the sponsors dime of course.  Classic films now become audiobooks with many featuring the original stars from way back when. Here's Arrowsmith starring Spencer Tracy & Fay Wray.

Show book

All the Way - A Play

Robert Schenkkan

This Tony Award–winning, “jaw-dropping political drama” chronicles LBJ’s fight for the Civil Rights Act and includes an introduction by Bryan Cranston (Variety).   Winner of the 2014 Tony Award for Best Play, as well as Best Play awards from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle, the Outer Critics Circle, the Drama League, and numerous other awards, All the Way is a masterful exploration of politics and power from the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Robert Schenkkan.  All the Way tells the story of the tumultuous first year of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s presidency. Thrust into power following the Kennedy assassination and facing an upcoming election, Johnson is nevertheless determined to end the legacy of racial injustice in America and rebuild it into the Great Society—by any means necessary. In order to pass the landmark 1964 Civil Rights bill, LBJ struggles to overpower an intransigent Congress while also attempting to forge a compromise with Martin Luther King, Jr., and navigate the increasingly fractious Civil Rights Movement.  Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston played President Johnson in the play’s celebrated Broadway production, for which he was awarded the Tony Award for Best Actor. In this edition, Cranston provides an illuminating and personal introduction.

Show book

Female Poet The: Volume 1

Various Authors, Eliza Acton,...

The gentler sex or the deadlier of the species.  Between these two definitions of the female gender lies a collection of some of the most beautiful verse ever written.  For much of history women have been seen rather than heard.  In this volume poets of great depth and feeling express themselves on a range of topics and in ways that perhaps only a woman can. Here in Volume 1 we bring you the works from Eliza Acton to Charlotte Bronte by way of Jane Austen, Aphra Behn, Anne Bradstreet, Anne Bronte and many others. Our readers include Ghizela Rowe and Richard Mitchley.

Show book

You Can Leave - a novel

Laurie Calhoun

When is a suicide not a suicide? You Can Leave, a novel by Laurie Calhoun, portrays a dark, disturbing, dystopic world where dissenters are permanently silenced whenever perceived of as threats by ruthless sociopaths occupying the highest corridors of power. The narrator relays her experiences at the hands of "the new mob", a coordinated network of operatives enlisted from all walks of life on a "need to know" basis to carry out what appear to be trivial tasks for enticing sums of money. Lost in the labyrinth of an insane bureaucracy run amok, the heroine charts her path to survival using the only available means: her capacity to think. But will that be taken away from her as well?
Where Franz Kafka meets George Orwell meets Jorge Luis Borges, the world of You Can Leave is fraught with paranoia and fear but illuminated by the light of pure reason. As the targeted protagonist uses logic alone to surmount hurdle after hurdle, she leaps in and out of the frame created for her by the author, thereby forcing the reader to confront an unsettling possibility: Could this be the world in which we currently live?
Set in 1993-1994, before the ubiquity of GPS technology and cell phones, You Can Leave presages what would become the century of mass surveillance in the age of the internet.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Part I: The Town
Part II: The Summer of Love
Part III: The Bunker
(Double Effect)
(The Aberrants)
(The Man Who Knew Too Much)
(Never Heard, Never Read)
Epilogue
Postscript

Show book