London Underground celebrates Polish poetry

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Tube customers will be able to enjoy a new set of poems by major Polish poets from the start of June.

Every season, six poems are selected to be displayed in tube carriages across London.

The latest collection will be displayed in train carriages and will mark the centenary of internationally renowned poet Czeslaw Milosz.

The Polish poems featured include Blacksmith Shop by Czeslaw Milosz, Nothing Special by Zbigniew Herbert and Star by Adam Zagawewski.

The poets were close friends and were writing in the dark shadow of Polish suffering during and after the Second World War.

Milosz translated the poems of Herbert and introduced Adam Zagajewski to English-speaking readers.

All three poets were artists building a world ‘from remnants’, celebrating the joys of ordinary life despite the ravages of history.

Three other poems by British poets continue this theme of the power of poetry to record the world and to give weight to memory and hope.

The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins is written in Hopkins’s personal language of religious ecstasy, At Sixty by Scottish poet Christine de Luca about reaching the age of sixty was originally written in Shetlandic, a Scots dialect still spoken in the Shetland Isles, and Ourstory by Carole Satyamurti is a tribute to the unsung ‘awkward women’ whose tenacity helped to liberate the lives of women today.

Customers can also pick up leaflets of the poems in this collection at five Tube stations from Friday 10 June.

The stations are South Kensington, Embankment, Covent Garden, Russell Square and Moorgate.

Judith Chernaik, the founder of Poems on the Underground, said: “We hope that Londoners and visitors alike will enjoy this latest collection of poems which celebrate one of the greatest Polish poets of our time.”

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