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last update:
 
11 May23

Maria Jastrzebska photo
photo © Lizzie Barrington
 
e-mail Maria
Maria Jastrzębska blog
Snow Q Project
Maria at Second Light

poetry favourites:
Cinnamon Press
Waterloo Press
Poetry International

and in the shop…
collections –
“Small Odysseys”
and
“Everyday Angels”
Waterloo Press;
 
“The True Story of Cowboy Hat and Ingénue”
Liquorice Fish / Cinnamon Press;
 
“I’ll Be Back Before You Know It”
Pighog Press;
 
“Syrena”
Redbeck Press;
 
bi-lingual – “Cutite vechi” / “Old Knives”
Integral/CLP (Bucharest)

 

 

this poet is taking part in the poetry pRO project
this poet is published in the Series project

 

Maria Jastrzębska was born in Warsaw and came to the U.K. as a child. Her most recent collections are Small Odysseys (Waterloo Press 2022) and The True Story of Cowboy Hat and Ingénue (Liquorice Fish/CinnamonPress 2018). Her selected poems were translated into Polish The Cedars of Walpole Park (see below) and Romanian Cutite vechi (Integral 2017) with work also published in Finnish, French, Japanese and Slovene.
 
She has co-edited several anthologies, including Queer in Brighton (New Writing South 2014), co-translated Elsewhere by Iztok Osojnik (Pighog Press 2011) and translated The Great Plan B selected poems by Justyna Bargielska (Smokestack Press 2017). She has done various jobs including teaching Self Defence and creative writing, as well as community interpreting. She lives in Brighton.
 
Early work such as Which Of Us Wears The Trousers was popularised by feminist and lesbian presses and magazines of the 1980’s and 1990’s: Spare Rib, Naming The Waves (Virago), Serious Pleasure (Sheba), Musn’t Grumble (Women’s Press) and The Virago Book of Wicked Verse while The Good Immigrant was used by teachers in schools and colleges. She continues to be widely published in journals and anthologies from The New British Poetry (Paladin), As Girls Could Boast (Oscars Press), Parents (Enitharmon in assoc. with Second Light 2000), See How I Land (Oxford Poets and Refugees, Heaventree Press 2009), to Hallelujah for 50ft Women (Bloodaxe 2015), Songs for the Unsung (Grey Hen Press 2017) and Wretched Strangers (Boiler House Press 2018).
 
She has always been concerned with borders and boundaries: between cultures, languages, social and sexual identities, health and illness. She was a contributor to Telling Tales About Dementia (Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2009) and her drama Dementia Diaries toured nationally with Lewes Live Literature in 2011. She won the Grey Hen Press Poetry Competition in 2014. She was the writer for Snow Q ACE-awarded cross-arts collaborative project. Her multi-lingual poem The Subsongs of Crow from this project was highly commended in the Forward Book of Poetry 2020 and the filmpoems of her work made by filmmaker Wendy Pye have been internationally screened.
 

Maria Jastrzębska’s poems open out like adventures in a dual land that is both here and elsewhere. The elsewhere is both place and history: the one gives life to the other, the place to the history, the elsewhere to the here, the fable to the reality. The mixture is rich and clear as alcoholic spirits.

 

George Szirtes

See also:
 
Maria Jastrzębska blog
 
Snow Q Project
 
Cedry z Walpole Park/The Cedars of Walpole Park, 2015, K.I.T. Stowarzyszenie Żywych Poetów – ISBN 978-8-3613819-4-5