Exiled Poets

...Joseph Brodsky, Jaroslav Seifert, Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz, and many others have endured censorship or jail terms or stays in psychiatric wards, their ordeal often culminating in expulsion or flight from their country...

...Many of the poems in this volume have in fact been translated by the author himself, and his command of English is fluent and resourceful enough to make his verse engagingly idiomatic for American readers...

...If Stanislaw Baranczak's career in the West is any indication, the answer is no...

...In a poem based on Laura Ingalls Wilder's book, The Long Winter, the narrator promises to be "eyes" for her blind sister, but cannot bring herself to describe the sight of their starving, freezing livestock...

...He is celebrated in his native land for nine volumes of his own work, as well as his skillful translations of British and Russian poets into Polish...

...The Weight of the Body: Selected Poems (TriQuarterly Books, 68 pp., $16.95) is the first book of his verse to appear in English...

...You who watched with longing from a distance unbridgeable as death...

...Everything Sheck writes reminds us that "this flawed world is more beautiful than anything / and we have it for so brief a time...

...Baranczak left Poland for the United States in 1981 and has been successfully facing the challenge of freedom ever since...

...The poet then sees the wooden figures as a child's nightmare of its parents—godlike, yet somehow beyond our frantic calls...

...The mannequins are dressing for spring...

...His work pays homage to those who manage to adapt, regardless of interruptions or dislocations, who preserve their balance in the face of catastrophe...

...She describes the estrangement we all suffer from time to time—the sense that somehow we are not at home in our own lives...

...Persephone, imprisoned in the barren cavern of Hades, remembers her mother, goddess of the fruitful earth...

...Thus one of his favorite strategies is to employ everyday images in recounting stories of bureaucratic inhumanity...

...But her imagination also looks "deep into the mangled beauty of the world...

...In "After Gloria Was Gone," a group of former refugees laugh at the hurricane's damage to their neighborhood—minor compared to their previous afflictions...

...Finally, unscathed by tragedy, or even unpleasantness, they become monsters who mock our humanity...

...Survivors of Hitler's Final Solution, of labor camps in the taiga, or leaky boats struggling to cross Indochinese waters, these men and women have learned to weather life's arbitrary cruelties...

...from 1981-86.The first section's focus is often evident in the titles: "Temporary Shortages," "Housing Poems," "A Winter Diary," "Shopping Poems...

...It's time to go back home, remove the crosses/of tape from our windows, though we can't do the same/ to our pasts or futures which have been crossed out / so many times...

...The world uttered its unstoppable fullness...

...When, in " A Poetry Reading, " the event is disrupted by go vernment agents who harass the audience and then arrest some of them, we are told that the intruders "didn't work long, since there is a certain film on TV and a man is only human...

...But whereas in the early part of the century poets like the surrealists used fantasy to spice up humdrum reality, today it can be argued that experience, "always on aroll," exceeds the imagination...

...Behind his joking manner, however, Baranczak believes that "From an ancient tomb inscription (which, by naming someone who once lived tries to invalidate the anonymity of his death) to, say, Philip Larkin's lyricism of modern deprivation, poetry has always been a desperate call for fair play, for sticking to the human/humane rules of the game...

...Picking themselves up and going on with the show has come to be what they do best...

...Allowed no rest, you moved within the stark cage of exile while you longed more than anything for hands...

...Strolling past a department store, she observes how Night-hushed, the rows of brittle windows glitter: skins of ice...

...After all, their Eastern European counterparts found their subjects ready-made...

...Besides the six Io poems, other figures, mythic and real, speak of their difficulties...

...Will that heroic form of the imagination now disappear as the newly liberated authors find themselves negotiating at commercial publishing houses, competing with schlock novels, cable television and VCRs for an audience...

...Sheck is able to crawl inside the skin of these and other personages and express their pain, speak in the language of their sorrow...

...Adam and Eve, expelled from Eden, roam aimlessly through the world, yet "could never belong there, not really...

...Mixed in with sympathy, many American writers no doubt also have felt twinges of envy...

...The second section occasionally expresses nostalgia for the familiar physical landscape the poet has been deprived of, or tries to make sense of events in the country he has left—one long poem describes the imposition of martial law and the crackdown on Solidarity in 1981...

...In her second book she has chosen a heroine who has lost even her human form...

...Baranczak's main themes are summarized in "Curriculum Vitae": My skills and accomplishments unappreciated here: my East European expertise on how to remain silent while arrested or how to fool the censor...

...And while they might have had to resort to underground publication, they wrote for a public of eager readers—men and women who shared a common experience of oppression and a delight in attempts to bamboozle censors...

...The discordant, earthy humor accentuates the horror...

...Behind them lies the world of the untouched: red shoes and black shoes, shirts stiffened over cardboard throats...

...Their arms "reach out/but cannot unfreeze...

...The children picking flowers by the river seemed far away as stars...

...LAUME Sheck writes about banishment, too, although she is no expatriate...

...Sheck dwells fancifully on her plight, particularly her loss of the most familiar sensual experiences...

...Mostly, though, the later poems deal with the emigre's feeling of estrangement, and with his efforts to start a new life in a foreign land...

...After a couple of months, even the tongue knows how to curl in your mouth the only way that produces a correct the...

...A series of poems on the cavepaintings in Lascaux consider these communications from our primitive ancestors...

...Another poem has the secret police arriving as "The Three Magi," but their star is the flash of an ID badge, the stable their victim's house...

...Eurydice thinks how Orpheus' love for her sabotaged his attempt to bring her back to the living...

...Exile is our birthright...

...In such an environment, says Baranczak, "normalcy may become a revelation" for the artist...

...Both Baranczak and Sheck understand that exploring such deprivation sharpens a poet's observation, and the knowledge of what is truly human...

...They echo Shelley's belief in the urgency of the poet's vision, the idea—and the hope—that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world...

...Writers & Writing EXILED POETS BY PHOEBE PEHINGELL Now that Communist regimes are melting away like snow in a spring thaw, we may wonder how these changes will affect the budding generation of Eastern European writers whose precursors' names read like a litany of courage...

...In a spirited Introduction Baranczak suggests that "writing poetry is perhaps nothing more than trying to play a straight man to that rambling, rambunctious, never-to-be-interrupted, always on a roll, stand-up comic, the world...

...Those who have not been deported from their native land may feel banished from mother's breast, home, school...

...Another couple of months and, while tying your shoelace in the street you realize that you're actually doing it just to tie you shoelace, and not in order to routinely check if you're not followed...

...For from the Psalmist to Rilke we have heard that we are "strangers and sojourners...

...Sheck often evokes a childlike fear of helplessness, of abandonment...

...White skin, white hooves, how you passed without touching what formerly you'd stopped to touch...

...She succeeds equally in creating her own images...

...By juxtaposing two books of poems, one sometimes stumbles on an insight neither might have provided by itself...

...my certified diploma in waiting for a bus, for hours, in a blizzard, in afield that's open like an open verdict: all useless here, in the land of the free and the home of quartz-watch precision...

...After reading Sheck I am no longer inclined to suppose that poets from Poland or any other Eastern European country will feel less alienated should their governments turn genuinely democratic...

...Isaak Babel, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and Boris Pasternak were led or hounded to their graves...

...And for the first time you saw it...

...The book is divided between works written in Poland from 1970-80, and those composed in theU.S...

...Io at Night (Knopf, 84pp.,$18.95) recalls the unfortunate Greek maiden, beloved of Zeus but transmogrified into a cow by Hera, his jealous wife...

...The brilliant deer, bison and horses bring their stone-age artists into the radius of our understanding...