View With A Grain Of Sand: Selected Poems

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

A remarkable, graceful collection from one of Europe’s most prominent and celebrated poets.

In these 100 poems, Wislawa Szymborska portrays a world of astonishing diversity and richness, in which nature is wise and prodigal and fate unpredictable, if not mischievous. With acute irony tempered by a generous curiosity, she documents life's improbability as well as its transient beauty.

"Wislawa Szymborska is not only one of the finest poets living today, but also one of the most readable. In these dazzling new translations Baranczak and Cavanaugh convey the full range of her wit and humor in poems that read as if they were written in English.” -Charles Simic

“Wislawa Szymborska is not only one of the finest poets living today, but also one of the most readable. In these dazzling new translations Baranczak and Cavanaugh convey the full range of her wit and humor in poems that read as if they were written in English.”  - Charles Simic

“This is the third selection, by my count, of her poems in English. It is also the most dapper, the most fastidious, a crystallization entirely appropriate to this maker, whose poems depend so much on transparence. As with Cavafy, with Alberti, those saints of metaphorical intonation, everything depends on the envisioned vocalise. Accumulated versions, over years, reveal that Szymborska is a subtle, even subversive muse of vulnerability and a great European Poet.”  - Richard Howard