Queen Cells - by Malgorzata Lebda (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Dedicated to soil, Queen Cells contains thirty-one poems, in both their native Polish and translated English, arranged in four sections. These poems span a seasonal year in the life of one family and one small village, Żeleźnikowa Wielka, in the Beskid Mountains of southern Poland. This village, with its fields, forest, slaughterhouse and neighbours, becomes the book's protagonist. The important figures of father and mother, of animals (bees, cows, dogs), of fire and water contribute to the communal and private rituals of love, illness, healing, death. Malgorzata Lebda's writing is organic, unflinching yet tender, and Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese's translations provide readers with a vivid, immediate way into this poet's dark and luminous world.

Review Quotes

The pastoral is haunted in Malgorzata Lebda's Queen Cells, translated with dark, glistening precision by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese. I thought of the folk-horror of Sylvia Plath's bee poems. A sequence to impress and unsettle.

- Clare Pollard

Dreamlike but knife-sharp, this sequence of poems hums faintly with the buzzing of bees and the almost imperceptible sounds of a northern forest. A mysterious father teaches his children about death while himself moving towards it. These unsettling, precise poems instantly draw the reader into a tangible world of their own, located in a liminal space between memory and myth.

- Clarissa Aykroyd

Elemental, moving, unflinching. This is a book of rough tenderness for the soil itself, for all its creatures, animals, insects - bees especially - and ourselves. At times our human blood mingles with that of the animal world: a sister's nosebleed and the blood on her father's hands from a killed hare as he tends the child. A rural upbringing is distilled through a seamless stream of images. With startling clarity a daughter recounts the stories in duet with intermittent adages and reflections from a ghost father. Subtle and imaginative translations by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese lightly run close to the original. Malgorzata Lebda's poems carry you through changing seasons, moments, flowing swiftly towards the inevitable end - only to make you want to start again from the beginning.

- Maria Jastrzębska

To read Malgorzata Lebda's Queen Cells, poem after poem, is to witness an expert archer firing arrow after arrow straight into the bullseye. Not a wasted word, no ornament; only an elemental concision drawn deep from the claggy soil of the Beskidy Mountains in the south of Poland. Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese's translations capture the reticent pitch and spare, gut-punching drama of Lebda's Matecznik, giving English-language readers a rare chance to encounter this major talent in European poetry.

- Alice Lyons