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Wislawa Szvmborska. View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems. Stanislaw Baranczak, Clare Cavanagh, trs. London. Faber. 1996. 214 pages. L8.99. ISBN 0-571-19163-0.
The award of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature to Wislawa Szymborska took most people by surprise (see WLT 71:1, pp. 5-12). Outside her native Poland relatively few poetry lovers-or even critics for that matterhad heard anything about Szymborska, although two of her verse collections had been translated into English. In England, Forest Books published People on a Bridge in 1990, and in the United States Harcourt Brace was responsible for a 1995 collection which has now been reproduced in paperback form by an eminent British publishing house. View with a Grain of Sand provides the best introduction in English to the poetry of Szymborska, an introduction which, one presumes, will attract many new readers to her work.
Szymborska's first book was published in a less than auspicious time for poetry:...