Poems for Grenfell Tower, The Onslaught Press “let’s do it” late poems – Jim Burns, The Black Light Engine Room Press Swamp Kiss – Colin Herd, The Red Ceilings Press Ways of Looking – David Grubb, smith/doorstop New York Hotel – Ian Seed, Shearsman Books 'About this title' may belong to another edition of this title.Poetry collections I have reviewed in 2018:

For English readers, her poetry is ‘other’ and I welcome that at a time when poetry needs to wake up to the contribution it can make at this time of transition and transparency. But the genius of her poetry is to take the literal beyond itself into memorable and surreal flights of metaphor, while remaining firmly anchored at the same time. Her work is on the frontline, also underscored by her background in journalism and broadcasting. Her particular experience in Romania means that the political is not an option: she embraces it. ‘Maria Stadnicka’s poetry is the most exciting I have read for some time. There’s certainly a sculptural quality to this writing, a lyric voice which is enveloped in a darkly surreal context.’ There’s an underlying sense of ‘exile’ which permeates the whole collection and a quality of empathy with suffering, particularly related to those who are alienated within an environment. ‘Maria Stadnicka’s pieces from The Unmoving are exceptionally accomplished, puzzling, rich, linguistically aware yet full of dark emotion. The only escape from the imposed absolute of non-being is resolution to go forward irrationally free.’ The poems create a sense of urgency and mystery. In Stadnicka’s poems social, personal, and literary landscapes are fused and at times must be forcibly dislocated, both repositioned and torn apart, so that one can continue. Literature becomes the communication and solidarity that permit the step towards wholeness. The chance for the existence of a future or even the future is removed.

What concerns Maria Stadnicka? She is speaking about the discontinuity of personal space and the intrusion of economic and political forces in an individual’s life that leads to fragmentation and, ultimately, to the dissolution of one’s reality. Her language assaults, bends, cajoles, thrusts a saber into the darkness of the very language she employs to explore death, degradation, the non-recognition of the human individual, war, urban violence, in short, the all-too-present context of our daily lives. Maria Stadnicka’s poems are clusters of consciousness, graphic, material images of our world. ‘A chisel, a hammer, a lyre reportage, intimate feelings, quips and criticisms.

The Unmoving by Maria Stadnicka