Here: Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak [Hardcover]

When this slim volume arrived in the noon mail, I put down what I was doing and read it right away. That's how much I enjoy Szymborska's exceptional, soaring yet concrete poetry. It didn't hurt that the translators are Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak: I have admired their work before. These poems seem so colloquial in tone and subject! Is that because of Szymborska, who writes in Polish, a language I don't know, or the translators? I suspect both: Szymbroska writes of a heightened everyday experience (this, plus the beauty and aptness of her choice of images) is what makes her poems immediately accessible. And to be a good translator of poetry is to be a poet in one's own right.

These are short poems --the longest runs two and a half pages, most under two pages and a number of them are half a page to a page long. The original, in Polish, is presented on the left hand side, the English translation on the right.
Here is a series of poems about all sorts of things --on divorce, on memory, on looking back at oneself as a teenager. There are (short) paeans to Ella Fitzgerald and to Vermeer's astounding painting, Milkmaid. The longest poem is a mock interview with Mme. Atropos, the goddess who cuts the strings of our lifelines and introduces us to Death.

The lead poem, 'Here,' catalogs the mundane objects and extraordinary feelings we experience in this material world: "... chairs and sorrows,/scissors, tenderness, transistors, violins,/teacups, dams, and quips...' 'Ignorance works overtime here,' she writes, 'something is always being counted, compared, measured,/from which roots and conclusions are then drawn.' She ends the poem:

Life on Earth is quite a bargain.
Dreams, for one, don't charge admission.
Illusions are costly only when lost.
The body has its own installment plan.

And as an extra, added feature,
you spin on the planets' carousel for free,
and with it you hitch a ride on the intergalactic blizzard,
with times so dizzying
that nothing here on Earth can even tremble.

Just take a closer look:
the table stands exactly where it stood,
the piece of paper still lies where it was spread,
through the open window comes a breath of air,
the walls reveal no terrifying cracks
through which nowhere might extinguish you.

Not all of the poems in this collection work. I could have done without "Ella in Heaven" and "Vermeer" --not that they're bad but they feel shallow, as though pretending to more meaning than they actually show. But immediately after these two short poems, there is another, equally short one, entitled "Metaphysics," and she has won me over again.

It's been and gone.
It's been, so it's gone.
In the same irreversible order,
for such is the rule of this foregone game.
A trite conclusion, not worth writing
if it weren't for an unmentionable fact,
a fact for ever and ever,
for the whole cosmos, as it was was and will be,
that something really was
until it was gone,
even the fact
that today you had a side of fries.

I do not think this is a wholly successful poem. Robert Creeley, for one, has long done this kind of thing better. But I admire Szymborska for trying it, and I love the way she plays with simple, not complicated, words to express both simple and complex thoughts and moods. Long may her flag wave high!

The poet W. Szymborska is astonished with life. And yet she knows it won't last.

Tiny, tiny creatures ("Foraminifera"--which sent me Googling), who lived long ago, each leaving microscopic shells astound us now as the Cliffs of Dover. Other micro-organisms so small "They don't even have decent innards.../They may not even know they are--or aren't." fascinate her so much that she had already planned to write about them for years. There's so much "stuff" (...teacups, dams and quips) on this spinning planet, yet nothing falls off or even trembles. A huge gale stripped all the leaves off from the trees, yet look! "one leaf/left/to sway solo on a naked branch". We have this this thing called "space" (ie, the universe)--it has everything in in it, yet is so empty, vastly open, yet "shut tight since nothing can escape from it". One day on the peaceful, quiet savanna, a violent clash occurs between an antelope and a lioness ("Two creatures who want to live"), yet no one and no thing is guilty. There are people known as "Assassins", who think about killing for days on end, except for when they "eat their meals with gusto/pray, wash their feet, feed the birds..." (is that regular looking guy next to me actually a sociopath, I wonder). Every face on earth throughout all time is different--or is it? An old Greek statue remains artful although time has rendered it merely a torso, and missing many parts and pieces.

And nothing lasts: an idea for a poem, unheeded, vanishes; the teenager she once was is not who she is; marriages end and things get divided up; there could be some cataclysm with a "Day after--without us"; "Billions of faces on the earth's surface...[sink] in the mirror of oblivion"; those tiny microorganisms "still decide our life and death"; someone dies in a "Highway Accident", yet others don't even know that it happened; in another accident a woman's husband is killed, yet she refuses to identify the body, even though their names are engraved on the wedding ring..."since our names are completely ordinary--"; people get killed by assassins; antelopes get eaten by lions; leaves get blown off of trees; etc. You get the picture; there's all this stuff "Here", and it is amazing, yet it is all so fleeting.

In the end she has "An Interview with Atropos" ("Death"; another google trip for me), and gets nowhere in her quibble with Ms.Atropos about why she cuts the threads of life off for people--only in parting, an "Au revoir" (I would have said "auf Wiedersehen", but she actually said "Do widzenia"; In the end, the statue keeps crumbling away; in the end all the people must make their way through the Labyrinth of life with their own twists and turns, yet for everybody travels the same path at the end,

"Then abruptly an abyss,
an abyss, but a little bridge,
a little bridge, but shaky,
shaky, but the only,
there's no other."

In the end, I was astonished by the poetry and the poet. Not all the poems were great, and the book was too brief, yet, in the end this ordinary yet amazing world, as seen through Szymborska's microscope/telescope of playful irony, delights and amazes the reader. Recommend.

She's wonderful, open, without pretension, and delighted to be alive -- all wonderful requisites for a poet. The translation is sharp and readable; of course I miss all the wonderful buzzing z's of Polish (but then I can't understand it, so why whine).

Now, let me complain about the Kindle formatting: the lines wrap unnaturally because they don't fit on the page, and the alternating pages in Polish are crammed up against the English text. Time to pay attention to detail, Amazon.

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