Description
Book SynopsisBuilding the Barricade, harrowing and demanding, here takes its place in English among the twentieth century's master works of war-witness.”—Jane Hirshfield
Building the Barricade, is poetry of witness, and a lyric account of the sixty-three day Warsaw uprising.
Caught between German occupation and the advancing Soviets, the Polish Resistance Home Army barricaded central Warsaw in hopes of liberating the city and gaining Polish sovereignty. Building the Barricade is Anna Świrszczyńska’s first-person account of the atrocities that destroyed over 60% of the Polish capital and left over 100,000 civilians and 16,000 Polish resistance fighters dead.
Świrszczyńska had joined the resistance as a military nurse and later wrote: “Day and night German bombers raged over the capital, burying the living beneath the rubble.”
Trade Review“Anna Świrszczyńska's elemental, extractive accountings of the Warsaw Uprising present a history of pain and of personhood so irremediable and unembellished that neither can be stripped from even the dead. Building the Barricade, harrowing and demanding, here takes its place in English among the twentieth century's master works of war-witness.”—Jane Hirshfield
"'War made me another person,' said Anna Świrszczyńska. Building the Barricade is the outcome of that change in that it took thirty years for these experiences to find their way into language. But the poem is also, undoubtedly, an agent of change, for us as well as her. Stanza by stanza we see the speaker transformed, stripped of anything but the terrible truths she is recording."—Eavan Boland
