Talking to My Body

A selection of Swir’s most essential poems, translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan, covering her full range from wartime witness to fierce celebration of the female body.

Why Start Here

Swir wrote several collections across her career, but for English-language readers this is the definitive entry point. The translation by Milosz and Nathan is widely regarded as the best way into her work, and it was Milosz who championed her internationally. In his introduction, he identified her central subject as “flesh in love and ecstasy, in pain, in terror, flesh afraid of loneliness, giving birth, resting, feeling the flow of time or reducing time to one instant.”

The poems move from the intimacies of desire and motherhood to the raw extremes of war, sometimes within a few pages. What holds them together is Swir’s insistence on the body as the ground of all experience. She does not write about the body from a distance. She writes from inside it.

At 140 pages, it is compact enough to read in a single sitting but dense enough to keep pulling you back. Many of these poems are only a few lines long, but each one carries the weight of a much larger statement.

What to Expect

Short, direct poems with no wasted words. The language is plain, almost blunt, and the imagery is visceral. You will encounter poems about a woman’s stomach, about a nurse holding a dying soldier, about the ordinary joy of a healthy body in motion. There is nothing decorative here. Swir writes as if every poem might be her last chance to say what matters. Read slowly, one poem at a time, and let each one land before moving on.