Agnieszka Studzinska

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Biographical note:  Agnieszka Studzinska was born in Poland in 1975 and came to the UK when she was 7. She works as an English teacher and aims to promote creativity in schools as well as to disaffected children who are literary phobic. She has previously worked as a freelance researcher in broadcasting. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the UEA. She lives in London with her husband and daughter. Snow Calling is her debut collection.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715596
ISBN:  9781844715596
Author:  Agnieszka Studzinska
Title:  Snow Calling
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jul-10
Extent:  64pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  11 mm
Weight:  96 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Reading Snow Calling is like delicately stepping onto snow itself; the poems resonate elusiveness with precision, the concrete with the fleeting. They explore the equivocal nature of ordinary moments. They are subtly crafted in their free verse, allowing the language to take the reader on a journey of the human condition: the rawness of living is presented in a poignant and at times mysterious way, questioning the silences of nature. They are accessible to all those who are willing to listen to the snow calling.

Main description:  Snow Calling is Agnieszka Studzinska’s debut collection, examining the fractures, the breaches of things, bringing a narrative meditation on the entity of displacement, whether in a relationship, ancestry or with oneself. The poems trace the delicate journey of transgression and coming together of family and history in their lyrical and elegiac styles, capturing:

the contradictions of what is whole and what is left behind.

The poems show the equivocal nature of an ordinary moment, opening that ordinariness into something much bigger than the actual, the specific. These poems explore what it means to be human and question silently the unanswerable.

Table of contents:
Snow Calling
Skating
Seasons
Language
An Observation on Figs
Swallows
Holding
The Bee’s Whisper
Mosquito
Fish
Amaryllis Nights
Air
In the Narrow Light
An Observation on Figs II
Wolf
Train
Mountains
Leaving
On Returning
Reunion
Whispers
Hotel
The Cactus
Tattoo
The Walk
Solanum Tuberosum
Photograph
Haunting
Cemetery
Calling
Music
Ending
Snow Calling
Notes on Haunting

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Excerpt from book:  

An Observation on Figs

Sycamore figs distended
in a family garden —
we picked them this morning
or should I say
you picked them
in your determination
& resilience against the fractured
branches of your own being &
I watched you
vanish between these branches
& emerge like a swimmer
out in the green tarns of foliage
& shout something about
finding or damage
& detain your breath once more &
dive into the loose light
of your life & this first summer
alone, without him —
gulp for air as you re-emerged
releasing more figs,
seeds of unwanted independence?
& not knowing where to put all this
or to whom you should give all this
& why this new light
makes you feel invisible?
Between the skin
of fruit and pulp,
you tell a daughter
not to depend
& choose cautiously
as you disappear into the contradictions
of what is whole
& what is left behind
on the branches
that you emptied.

Unpublished endorsement:  Agnieszka Studzinska’ poems convey the strangeness and freshness of the world, as if it were inscribed on memory or out of memory onto language sharp enough yet transparent enough to let us see and feel it.

George Szirtes

Unpublished endorsement:  Agnieszka Studzinska’s poems are at once delicate – in their use of subtle language, sparse form and precise image; but also emotionally powerful – in their strong evocation of the lives of women, love affairs and illness. These qualities are reminiscent of the work of poets such as Mary Oliver and Louise Glück, and are not common in British poetry today. These are brave and beautiful poems which will remain with you.

Tamar Yoseloff

Unpublished endorsement:  In Agnieszka Studzinska's spacious poems, the precision and uncertainty of nature invoke the fragility of what it is to be human, what it is to love.

Anne-Marie Fyfe