The shadow of World War II and displacement provide the context for deeply personal poems about motherland, love and the parts of life that constantly and irretrievably disappear yet remain so present. Jastrzebska writes with a uniquely feminine muscularity, tense, sinewy story - and image - poems with words to be chewed and tasted.
'In sparsely reticent, if by turns surreal, poems - and in unnervingly detached prose-poem accounts - Jastrzebska unfolds a past that, far from being another country, is a lost dimension of, and an insistent counterpoint to, the complex present.'
Anne-Marie Fyfe
'The shadow and tenor of two tongues, cultures, histories, and sexualities are deftly embedded in herpoetry — as is her use of forms, both in her traditional couplets and prose poems. She is willing to take risks, unafraid to display passion, and at the same time writes controlled intelligent verse.'
Sudeep Sen
Maria Jastrzebska was born in Warsaw, Poland and grew up in London. She now lives in Brighton. Her previous collections include 'POSTCARDS FROM POLAND' (Working Press) ‘HOME FROM HOME’ (Flarestack), 'SYRENA' (Redbeck Press) and 'I'll Be back before You Know It' (Pighog Press Nov 2008). She was co-editor of ‘Forum Polek’ a bilingual anthology of women’s writing, Poetry South (2007) and Whoosh! (Pighog Press/QWS/SOUTH). She founded SOUTH POLE and is chair of Queer Writing South. Her poems and translations have been widely published in anthologies and journals in the U.K and translated into Finnish, French, Japanese, Polish, Romanian and Slovenian. Moniza Alvi has described Maria's prose poems as "highly original -claustrophobic, disorienting and razor-edged" (Poetry International Web).
