This book has collaboration and translation at its heart: between people, words and images, languages, cultures. The poems came first, in Polish. Then came the photographic response to them. Then four translators, MARTA DZIUROSZ, MARIA JASTRZEBSKA, DANUSIA STOK and ELZBIETA WOJCIK-LEESE, took a set of 12 or 13 poems each and translated them into English. All people involved were women: the poet, the photographer, the four translators and the two editors. Together they arrived at 51 Polish poems, 51 English poems and 51 photographs making this collection. They raise themes such as cultural identity and migration, queerness, racism, isolation and family memories.

This first full-length cognitive poetic study of a single author and her composition process combines cognitive linguistics with genetic and literary criticism. It portrays two minds: the poet creating her poetics and poetry as well as the reader creating her interpretations of this poetry. It focuses on eight poems and their drafts, examining Elizabeth Bishop's poetic conceptualizations. It demonstrates how our awareness of such universal structures of invention as categorization, image schemas, metaphor, conceptual integration, metonymy, idealized cognitive models, licensing stories can assist us in deducing the original movement of writing during genetic analysis or in arriving at a reading of the poem's published version. Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) is one of the most eminent American poets. Her work has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese, Ph.D. in Linguistics, was a Fulbright scholar at the Vassar College Special Collections, which holds the Elizabeth Bishop archives. She translates contemporary Polish poetry and poetry written in English. She lives in Copenhagen.

One of the most versatile and rebellious poets in Poland, Swietlicki takes us into streets, cafes, rooms, and conversations where - with his signature dark glasses - he ponders metaphysical questions in the minutiae of daily life. These are poems about life, forgiveness, communication, love, death, and time: in the slit of a mailbox, he sees "Not the light but / the galloping Now." The poems have an urban edge and bite, and Swietlicki has recorded many of them as lyrics with his rock band. The collection, his first to be translated into English, culls work from all twelve of his published volumes.

Krystyna Milobedzka, one of Poland's leading and most innovative poets, was first published in 1960; her early volumes were singled out by Stanislaw Baranczak for their "dramatic ungrammaticalness", as they speak about elementary human relationships - between woman and man, mother and child - "in a language that is 'being thought'." Her prose poems, rooted in the body and earth, reveal an immediacy of expression, "seemingly uncontrolled, reporting the birth of the yet unspecified thought: a sentence broken off, a sudden mental leap, an ellipsis, a slip of the tongue." Nothing More, Milobedzka's first full-length book in English, samples her entire career. Here her kinship with the world, a unity in multitude, is reported in imperfect jottings, with "words broken in half broken to quarters". Commenting on her sparse diction, the poet explains: "I think it would be best if each writer could invent their own language to write down the very little they have to say. Only the necessary words." Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese invents her own translated language to convey Milobedzka's experimental poems into English. More 'collaborations' than translations, according to Robert Minhinnick in his introduction to this book, they are "the fruits of an exemplary literary symbiosis."

The austerity of Marzanna Kielar's mindscape compels with its monochromy. Her poems insistently return to northern Poland cataloguing the sea, fog, wind, lakes, rivers, woods, fields, and crows. "My first homeland is a post-German landscape," she acknowledges, "with wild rose bushes, stone stables, metal window fittings, red roofs."

Kielar does not comment on Poland's past or present. Like so many other young Polish poets who started to publish after 1989, she no longer needs to: confronting history and the state has finally become an aesthetic choice rather than a poet's moral obligation. When Kielar speaks about her obligation as a poet, she speaks about bringing home what we tend to call reality, love, death. Always aware of the risk involved in naming, she strives to bring out of darkness words and their meanings.

Marzanna Bogumila Kielar (b.1963, Goldap), a graduate in philosophy from Warsaw University, works at the College of Special Needs Education in Warsaw and co-operates with the literary magazine "Krasnogruda." She has published two collections of poetry and has received the Kazimiera Illakowiczowna Prize for the best debut of the year, and the Koscielski Foundation Prize; she has been nominated for the NIKE Prize.

Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese teaches translation and contemporary literature in English at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She co-edits "Przekladaniec," a journal of literary translation; her translations of contemporary Polish poets have appeared in numerous journals, and the Zephyr anthology "Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird."

Since the lyric beginnings of Polish poetry, writers have been burdened with duties typically delegated to politicians, soldiers, priests, or journalists. The political, social, and cultural changes of the last decade have allowed Polish poets to cast off these burdens, and focus instead on individual expression and varied aesthetic movements." Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird "focuses on the core group of this movement--poets born between 1958 and 1969.

." . . in a constant confusion of mystification and authenticity, distance and directness, representational skepticism and mimetic euphoria, game-playing and honesty, the poets presented here perform their informal, singular duties towards language and the human condition."--from the introduction by Marcin Baran