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WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA has worked as an editor, translator, and columnist, though she is best known as a poet. In 1996, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A new book of poems by Wislawa Szymborska is a rare and exciting event. When Here was published in Poland, reviewers marveled, “How is it that she keeps getting better?” These twenty-seven poems, as rendered by prize-winning translators Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak, are among her greatest ever. Whether writing about her teenage self, microscopic creatures, or the upsides to living on Earth, she remains a virtuoso of form, line, and thought.

From the title poem:

I can’t speak for elsewhere,

but here on Earth we’ve got a fair supply of everything.

Here we manufacture chairs and sorrows,

scissors, tenderness, transistors, violins, teacups, dams, and quips . . . 

Like nowhere else, or almost nowhere,

you’re given your own torso here,

equipped with the accessories required

for adding your own children to the rest.

Not to mention arms, legs, and astonished head.

Here 3

Thoughts That Visit Me on Busy Streets 7

An Idea 11

Teenager 15

Hard Life with Memory 19

Microcosmos 23

Foraminifera 27

Before a Journey 29

Divorce 31

Assassins 33

Exmaple 35

Identification 37

Nonreading 39

Portrait from Memory 41

Dreams 45

In a Mail Coach 49

Ella in Heaven 53

Vermeer 55

Metaphysics 57

Absence 59

Highway Accident 63

The Day After---Without Us 65

An Occurrence 67

An Interview with Atropos 71

Greek Statue 77

Labyrinth 79

In Fact Every Poem 83