Wisława Szymborska

Here

Every new book by Wisława Szymborska is a greatly anticipated event, and every unknown poem is sacred. So too on this occasion. Here is her third collection of new poems, following Moment and Semi-Colon, to appear since 1996, when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
“Twelve mini treatises on our state of being here, suspended between the sweeping past, full of mystery, drama, pain that’s over and remaining crumbs of beauty, and the unknown future. Between memory, which is the foundation of our conscious existence and which ever more insistently tries to take control of us, and the instinct for life”, wrote one astute reader of this volume.
Behind the linguistic precision we can feel an incredible concentration of thoughts and imagination. These poems stun us with their accumulation of details from the visible (and the invisible) world, which is a source of constant wonder – and that is the main key word for this poetry. What makes it possible is the gift of careful observation, perceiving everything as if for the first time, without any axioms, certainties or accumulated knowledge. We can say the same thing about Szymborska’s poetry as she says about the world: “The ignorance here is hard-earned”. Hence in almost every poem there is a wealth of surprises and discoveries.
Despite the fact that many of the poems are mini philosophical treatises, they do not change into abstract intellectual speculation at all. The last thing we might suspect these poems of doing is losing touch with red-blooded, solid reality. They speak of acutely painful experiences suffered by modern man – terrorist attacks, divorces, identifying the bodies of some plane crash victims… But they’re also about the essence and mystery of dreams, about memory, and the process of creating poetry. About Szymborska’s greatest loves – Vermeer and Ella Fitzgerald. About journeys (which is another important key word) within space (and beyond the limits of space), but even more readily within time. About a wonderful expedition by stagecoach with Juliusz Słowacki… It’s quite astounding how many worlds can be fitted into nineteen poems!