#RivetingReviews: Wioletta Greg reviews PSALM TO SAINT SABINA by Radosław Wiśniewski, translated by Anna Blasiak

‘In your person, our history is stitched together’

Psalm to Saint Sabina, translated by Anna Blasiak, is a book-length poem by Polish poet Radosław Wiśniewski that traces the life of his great-grandmother, Sabina Szopf. Set against the upheavals of twentieth-century Eastern Europe, from tsarist rule to Soviet and German occupations, wartime deportation and postwar Poland, the book weaves together personal memory, everyday life and historical trauma. Through Sabina’s resilience, contradictions, faith, and humour the work creates an intimate portrait that reflects broader histories of survival and human endurance. 

Wiśniewski places a woman at the centre of historical experience, giving voice to Sabina’s life in a way that challenges the habitual marginalisation of women in historical writing. The poet implicitly critiques the traditional neglect of women’s stories in historical narratives and affirms the significance of women’s lives as meaningful in themselves. The book does not tell a story in the conventional sense. Rather, it transmits experience across generations, languages, and from private memory into the realm of collective history. Yet it quickly becomes clear that this intimacy does not confine the work to a family anecdote. On the contrary, it opens onto the twentieth century in its most tangible, corporeal dimensions: deportation, hunger, fear and irreversible loss.

Wiśniewski structures his narrative poem like a prayer, yet one stripped of religious consolation. It is a psalm in the original sense of the word: addressing someone who remains silent. God is present in the text but non-intervening, ‘silent like the wall in your room’. Sabina’s faith does not consist in expecting an answer but in persistent endurance: in gestures, rituals, and the everyday ethics of care and stubbornness. It is a practical, almost corporeal faith, free of pathos.

One of the book’s greatest strengths lies in its construction of memory. There is no hierarchy of events: alongside bombing and deportation appear flea-market keys, hidden cutlets, children’s games, coarse sayings and domestic humour. History does not arrive here as a ‘grand narrative’, but as an accumulation of details, precisely as it lodges itself in memory. This ensures that Sabina is never elevated to the status of a monument. She emerges as a figure full of contradictions: stern yet tender, devout yet obscene, angry yet capable of forgiveness. Her language, multilingual, rough and often shameless, becomes one of the poem’s most important carriers of meaning.

Particularly affecting is the passage in which individual memory collides with the vastness of collective death, without attempting to generalise or summarise it:

‘He didn’t interfere when they were killing your husband,
he was silent when those who didn’t manage
to escape across the Irtysh in winter
were axed off the benches in the back of a truck like dead icicles.’ 

This almost journalistic tone, devoid of rhetorical flourish, strikes more powerfully than any moral accusation. Wiśniewski does not ask ‘why’; he does not demand meaning. He records the fact and moves on. The ethics of the text are contained precisely in this gesture.

Psalm to Saint Sabina is also a book about inheritance: not only of trauma, but of language, modes of responding to the world, and the limits of anger and love. The great-grandmother’s memory permeates the narrator, shaping his perspective, yet it is never adopted uncritically. This is dialogue, not homage. Sabina is the ‘final authority’ but not a saint in the ecclesiastical sense, rather, a measure of human decency in a world that consistently denies it.

Anna Blasiak’s translation preserves the poem’s austerity and rhythm while making it fully accessible to an English-speaking audience. This is a text that does not seek to please, and that is precisely why it lingers in memory. Quietly devastating, at times brutally humorous, Psalm to Saint Sabina confirms that poetry can still serve as a form of testimony: without shouting, without sentimentality, without false reconciliation.

Psalm to Saint Sabina speaks urgently to contemporary readers. Its unflinching honesty, refusal of sentimentality, and careful attention to memory and history make it both challenging and necessary. In a world still marked by displacement, loss and the everyday negotiation between resilience and vulnerability, Wiśniewski’s poem reminds us of the power of witness, the ethics of attention, and the quiet courage embedded in ordinary life. 

The book also features intriguing, intimate photographs by Lisa Kalloo that interact with the poem, engaging with Sabina’s memories and life story rather than merely illustrating them. The volume is the first publication from the new Sideway Press from Ramsgate, which promises to be a very exciting venture.

Reviewed by Wioletta Greg

PSALM TO SAINT SABINA

Written by Radosław Wiśniewski 

Translated by Anna Blasiak

Photography by Lisa Kalloo

Published by Sideways Press (2026)

June 2026 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

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Wioletta Greg (Grzegorzewska) is a Polish-British writer living in United Kingdom since 2006. Currently, she lives in Lewes on the river Ouse. She is an accomplished poet, shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Swallowing Mercury, her first prose book translated to English by Eliza Marciniak, was longlisted for the 2017 the Man Booker International Prize. Greg’s tales are rich in colour and texture, facts and magic. They possess a lyrical prose offering; a picturesque depiction of a country both lost in time, yet still modern.