Peter Skrzynecki any annotations of poems?

[goose1]

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I have assesment on monday march 10th for english advanced. Were studying Peter Skrzynecki. i don't understand him and nned annotations onm his poetry... Can anyone help??

[Anisja]

Originally Posted by goose1

I have assesment on monday march 10th for english advanced. Were studying Peter Skrzynecki. i don't understand him and nned annotations onm his poetry... Can anyone help??

Peter Skrzynecki

Feliks Skrzynecki

This poem is a tribute to the dignity and stoicism in the face of loss and hardship to the poet’s father Feliks whose physical journey from Europe to Australia, from one culture to another, echoes through the poem and it’s clear that the impact of the journey is as strong for the son as for the father. This poem highlights that the hardest thing about physical migration is whether to keep or let go of the memories as migration allows the person to destabilise both physically and mentally. The poet deals with the emotional consequences of the physical journey.
The poet’s attitude is immediately apparent in the first stanza in the use of gentle and the possessive pronoun my which precedes it. The adjective gentle sets the tone of the poem and reveals the poet’s perspective of his father as one of love and admiration. The comparison with the Joneses suggests that Feliks is his own man and only wants to do ordinary things well. The simile like a only child shows the extent of love and devotion to the garden as Feliks walks around it and in a hyperbole sweeps its path / Ten time around the world, as if he is reliving his journey across the world and identifying and confirming his place in the new country. But in the second stanza the poet narrows the focus from the man in his garden to the darkened cracked hands, powerful images of hard, physical labour. The sense of his action is carried by the verbs broke, existed, turned and rolled. The inversion of the usual sentence order in these lines emphasises the actions. There is real admiration and awe in the son’s attitude to his father.
The third stanza shifts to the sense of the child feeling detached form his father’s heritage. The stanza introduces Feliks’ Polish heritage and suggests a life that the poet knows nothing about. There’s an implication that the Poles can share something but from which the son is excluded evident in I never got used too. The poet can share the cultural traits and memories kept alive from their family discussions but these are alien to him. The words violently, flowered and slaughtered imply that Feliks’ previous life was full of action and hard work, robust and physical. Yet the poet describes with poignancy the softness of his eyes that have never been dulled by the suffering of the forced labour camp in Germany during the Second World War.
The emphatic never in the concise fourth stanza reiterates this poignancy and the son’s admiration for his father’s stoicism. The father has suffered as well as endured evident in twice / They dug cancer out of his foot as dug reflects the severity of the surgery on his foot and ironically related to the metaphor of gardening. The surgery hasn’t dimmed the father’s love and contentment with his life emphasised in his stoic response “but I’m alive”. Indeed after the trauma of war, labour camp, displacement and migration, a cancer in his foot would seem a small thing in comparison.
The fifth stanza establishes the maturing of the poet as he remembers the language of his parents and uses it at the opportune time to defend his father in the face of bureaucratic complacency and ignorance emphasised in his degrading question “Did your father ever attempt to learn English?” the son’s contempt of this prejudice is evident in the image of dancing bear-grunts implying that the clerk was an animal showing no humanity. This stanza highlights the son’s continuing loyalty to his father and hints to the son’s own journey where the impact of his parent’s heritage begins to affect him.
The subsequent stanza reinforces the father’s contentment with his life by evoking beauty in the visual imagery of the garden and its colours. There’s a harmonious atmosphere as Feliks enjoys the garden he created, smoking and watching stars. His contentment with his own haven and with his journey is emphasised but the poet realises that although he loves and admires his father, he has never been content Happy as I have never been and is full of regret for a way of life he will never know nor fully understand.
The final stanza changes the poem’s focus to the son and his life revealing his loss of his inherited language altogether I forgot my first Polish word. This loss is in a sense the loss of his parent’s heritage, thus is the impact of the journey. The father is driven to keep it alive in his son but the final metaphor Hadrian’s Wall demonstrates the inevitability that the son will move further away from his father’s heritage in this new land of which his father is silently aware but unable to change his son’s course. This poem depicts the consequences of a physical journey and how experiences are different for each individual on the same journey
Post Card


A post card is a simple thing but the poet uses this ordinary, commonplace object to evoke matters of greater significance. The post-card view of Warsaw, the Polish capital, also places the speaker’s experiences of the city, and of his attachment to it, in a particular context. A post card at once idealises a location but with its size and character also diminishes it. Skrzynecki ingeniously conveys his contradictory feelings about Warsaw by concentrating on a post card of the city and its affect on him. This poem is divided into three sections which firstly deals with the arrival of the post card which prompts memories and a relationship with the city that poet has not yet acknowledged and asks questions that he does not wish to answer. The final section forces the confrontation and the poet acknowledges that his heritage must be faced.
In the first stanza of the first section, the usage of the word haunt immediately suggests that the post card is notable, that it has significance for the poet because it has connotations of ghosts or ideas hanging around that are unwanted. Since its arrival – and haunt emphasises the discrepancies in his emotions. The irony here is that post cards are usually the cause of excitement and anticipation as the recipient eagerly and quickly reads it, but Skrzynecki is haunted by it. The usage of the personal objective pronoun me gives the poem a personal feel. The card depicts an old part of Warsaw sent by a friend to remind the poet’s parents of where they came from. The second stanza gives a simple description of the phot on the post card. The poet unusually pores over this subject and meticulously notices its every feature from the Red buses to The river and its concrete pylons and the sky’s brightest shade. The colours in the post card are unnatural and his unfamiliarity with Warsaw is emphasised when he cannot tell whether something is a park. He’s irresistibly drawn to the images though there’s nothing extraordinary in the picture.
The poet however, is struck by the moment. The usage of the personal pronoun I in this stanza gives the effect of the poet’s direct conversation with Warsaw as he converses with it in the second person, I never knew you. The following Except in the third person emphasises the poet’s sheer distance and detachment in his life from the city. His confession doesn’t diminish the sense of his appreciation of the Great city and his bitterness at its destruction and the brutal deaths of its citizens implied in Its people massacred / Or exile – You survived. Notably he addresses the city in direct speech you, in the second person. The lines They shelter you, defending their country as they defend the patterns, condemn your politics (Communism), but still cherish your old religion are all profound patriotic imagery of the Polish migrants living Half a world away. These people are the dying generation attempting to preserve the allegiances and customs of a society and culture that has been annihilated. The White Eagle is a symbol of the country’s freedom. The second stanza establishes the conflict which lies in the question which ends this stanza What’s my choice to be? He emphasises that both his parents will be proud and speak of their Beloved Ukraine and will be lost in their own memories. The third stanza focuses on the poet’s recognition of the city’s offers but concludes that he cannot give it more than eyesight and praise; his response will not come from his heart. This stanza also ends with a question reinforces the poet’s conflict to acknowledge his connection and loss with the city.
The third section brings attention back to the post card which stimulated the poet’s refection on his heritage. Suddenly he is confronted by the inevitable acknowledgment but refuses to answer / The Voices / Of red gables / And a cloudless sky. He cannot ignore the fact of his heritage. Skrzynecki leaves the dilemma unsolved as in the line Whispers: / “We will meet / Before you die” suggests a fleeting acquaintance or perhaps a joining in union. But when the tree whispers to him it signals the end of his insularity as he reconciles with his past and now belongs to a group, he is complete.
This poem concludes that Skrzynecki comes to grips with the fact of his heritage which cannot be isolated since it was this isolation attempt that was the source of his unhappiness. This poem implies that a physical journey causes a journey and emphasises the consequences of it whether the undertaker liked it and what would they have done in retrospect. It is implied that a physical journey sometimes result in the loss of heritage as in migration which is often very hard to reconcile with. The adaptational consequences of migration are also underlined in this poem.

notes on two of Peters poems

[amied92]

very useful thank you.. does anyone have the actuall poems to post card, 10 mary st and feliks skrzynecki because i cant find them anywhere on the net... much appreciasted xoxox