by Bożena U. Zaremba
Petite figure, dark brown hair - lush and curly. Her slightly slanted eyes are kind, attentive and wide open to people who have come to listen to her poetry. The moment Cecilia Woloch starts to talk, the audience falls silent. This extraordinary gift of attracting people's attention immediately draws the listeners into the vibrant and powerful world of her poetic imagination. The emotional intensity, the meaning of each phrase and the rhythm of every stanza come across through her reading so forcefully that her poems assume a new, farther-reaching life. Her commentaries are brief yet telling, and Cecilia presents them only when she deems it necessary. Explaining her family roots is one of those instances.
The Polish blood runs through her veins thanks to her mother, whose ancestors came from a small village near Krakow; on the father's side, the story is more mysterious and colourful. It points to the Carpathia region, the southeastern part of today's Poland, which at some point in history belonged to Austria-Hungary and which was inhabited by Poles, Ukrainians, Lemkos, Jews, and Gypsies. The borders were constantly changing; nations and their cultures intermingled. The family name suggests the ethnic group that originally came from what is now Romania (or, according to other scholars, from the Balkans), but Cecilia, who can still hear the Slavonic melody of the language her father spoke with his relatives, concludes that her father may have been a Lemko. He was not very helpful in determining the ethnic origins of the family, but always denied being Polish or Ukrainian. Because of the family's conflicts with law, including the tragic murder of her grandfather, this branch of the family tree, veiled with deliberate silence, was somehow cut off.
When the family moved to America, everyone tried to blend in. They avoided speaking their native language in front of strangers. Still, in the coal-mining Pittsburgh, there existed distinct ethnic boundaries. "You have Chinese eyes and Negro hair," the kids from the neighbourhood would tease Cecilia. "What are you, anyway?" This question is still haunting her. Carpathia - once a mystical and surreal place - became tangible after Cecilia's first visit to the region in the 90's. She even found the village her grandparents came from and... a different world from what she imagined while listening to her father's infrequent stories. After repeated ethnic cleansings and after the World War II and Soviet destructions (when not only people were exterminated but birth, marriage, and property records were destroyed), this once harmonious multi-national, multi-religious and multi-cultural society ceased to exist.
It looks like Cecilia Woloch treats her poetry as a channel through which she can get back to her roots. Her most recent book Carpathia is no different in this respect. The title, however, should not be taken literally - "Carpathia" seems to refer to a spiritual state of mind rather than to a mere geographical place on the map. A lot of poems included in this collection are devoted to Cecilia's family members, foremost to her father. In "Mistake" the poet creates a suggestive picture of her father who, lying on his deathbed, lifts his hand - maybe to welcome death, or maybe to wave goodbye to his daughter, who is attending to him, or maybe "to touch his own life as it passed." Another beautiful poem "Watching Him Die" evidently refers to the celebrated villanelle by Dylan Thomas "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night", which Thomas wrote for his dying father. His manifesto of rebellion is turned upside down by Woloch, who shows the dignity of dying in its gentleness. This inspiration is one of many literary allusions - sometimes direct quotes - incorporated into this collection.
One of the joys of Cecilia Woloch's poetry is that it so beautifully and skilfully intermingles humour with emotional intensity, sensuality, and existential profoundness, like in "Why I Believed, as a Child, That People Had Sex In the Bathrooms". Similarly, she paints her self-portrait with wit and self-irony, in "Fireflies":
And these are my vices:
impatience, bad temper, wine,
the more than occasional cigarette,
an almost unquenchable thirst to be kissed...
and flirting with strangers and saying sweetheart
to children whose names I don't even know
and driving too fast and not being Buddhist
enough to let insects live in my house
She closes the poem with alliterated, sensuous imagery of her catching the fireflies "to smear their sticky, still-pulsing flickering onto my fingers and earlobes like jewels," drawing us into the past, into the deep, into the magical.
"Carpathia" is studded with poetic gems like postcards, which are (naturally) infused with motifs of travel - free and boundless as if in a Gypsy tabor. Underneath it all, there lies a clear conviction that each of us could have been somebody else, could have been born and lived somewhere else, and yet "We all dwell in one country, O stranger, the world."*
To learn more about the poet, including poetry-reading schedule, visit www.ceciliawoloch.com.
*Melaeger, Greek poet (1st century B.C.) - the book's motto
This article was originally published in Polish, in "Przegląd Polski", a cultural weekly to Polish Daily News, March 19, 2010, New York.
Photo caption: Photo by Jozef Naziemiec, courtesy of Bozena Zaremba
Bożena U. Zaremba, a bilingual journalist and translator, is editor of the Chopin Society of Atlanta's publication, Chopin Notes. She is a regular contributor to the Polish Daily News (Nowy Dziennik), published in New York. Her articles and interviews have also been published in Jazz Forum in Poland and in the Polish-Canadian Gazeta focusing on music, literature, and culture. She holds an M.A. in English from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and is a graduate of the State School of Music in Krakow where she studied voice. She is a Sudoku and Zumba enthusiast, and loves making sushi and chocolate truffles for her family.
