A new collected volume from the Nobel Prize–winning poet that includes, for the first time in English, all of the poems from her last Polish collectionOne of Europe’s greatest recent poets is also its wisest, wittiest, and most accessible. Nobel Prize–winner Wislawa Szymborska draws us in with her unexpected, unassuming humor. Her elegant, precise poems pose questions we never thought to ask. “If you want the world in a nutshell,” a Polish critic remarks, “try Szymborska.” But the world held in these lapidary poems is larger than the one we thought we knew.
Carefully edited by her longtime, award-winning translator, Clare Cavanagh, the poems inMap trace Szymborska’s work until her death in 2012. Of the approximately two hundred and fifty poems included here, nearly forty are newly translated; thirteen represent the entirety of the poet’s last Polish collection,Enough, never before published in English.
Map is the first English publication of Szymborska’s work since the acclaimedHere, and it offers her devoted readers a welcome return to her “ironic elegance” (The New Yorker).
Praise for Wislawa Szymborksa:
Extremely smart, witty, and level-headed, [Szymborska] seduces us with her wide range of interests, her atypical lack of narcissism for a poet, and her cheerful pessimism. New York Review of Books
Her poems offer a restorative wit as playful as it is steely and as humble as it is wise. Most poets jostle for center stage, but Szymborska looks on from afar, her wry acceptance of life s folly remaining her strongest weapon against tyranny and bad taste. Los Angeles Times Book Review
Refreshingly direct but always surprising, her poems keep taking us to further, unexpected perspectives. O, the Oprah Magazine
Dark, complex, and profoundly intelligent. Washington Post
[She] captures the nightmarish contingency of human survival, and the human callousness toward nature, with an ironic elegance miraculously free of bitterness. The New Yorker