Sylwetki i twórczość współczesnych poetek kaszubskich

Abstract

Kashubians, the ethnic group living in the Pomerania region for hundreds of years and speaking its own language, has created its own culture and tradition, also literary. The Kashubian literature, although barely a hundred-and-fifty-year-old, has a quite considerable output, especially of poetic works. Poetry conveys what is important and most intimate for a given community. Reading this literature, we can discover Kashubians’ most cherished values recorded in it. During less than one hundred and fifty years, they have turned out numerous collections of poetry, several anthologies as well as many works published in the papers or special issues. Yet, the history of this literature has never been fully analyzed and the contemporary poetry criticism is almost non-existent. Among the poets contributing to the panorama of the latest Kashubian poetry there are several women. Three of them: Krystyna Muza, Ida Czaja and Bożena Szymańska deserve a special attention, and the achievements of the latter will be briefly outlined here. When analyzing their poetry, I examined the themes, space in which they put their lyrical “I” and their characters, as well as the poetics of their works. Poetry is a space in which they discover and create their identity. They define it in relation to their own self, to another person, to the highest values.