EDA OSTROWSKAS WAYS TO RELIGIOUSNESS (Edy Ostrowskiej drogi do religijnosci)

Eda Ostrowska, a Lublin poetess with a painful interesting biography, is the authoress of unconventional 'scandalously personal' lyric poetry which oscillates between often exhibitionistic eroticism and metaphysical touch of the Absolute. The article analyses the various attitudes of Ostrowska's heroine towards the world, her 'own self', and God. Poetic ways lead her through uncovering her own subjectivity and identity, illness, ecstatic experience of love, femininity, especially in the bodily dimension, the rooting in human experience, and blasphemy. Amazingly, the incoherent recognition lead to revelation of the religious side of the lyric poetry, of Ostrowska-the-psalmist, who neither divests of her former discord to suffering nor give up the brave and picturesque language of objection but supplements it with an intimate idiom of prayer poetry, not as much confessional expression of trust but an exhibition of human perplexity.