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

Winner of the Heldt Prize for Translation. A new translation of the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, with an introduction by Czeslaw Milosz. This long-awaited volume samples the full range of Wislawa Szymborska's major themes: the ironies of love, the wonders of nature's beauty, and the illusory character of art. Szymborska's voice emerges as that of a gentle subversive, self-deprecating in its wit, yet graced with a gift for coaxing the extraordinary out of the ordinary.

Poems New and Collected: 1957-1997 is the definitive, complete collection of poetry by Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska.

Described by Robert Hass as unquestionably one of the great living European poets and by Charles Simic as one of the finest poets living today, Szymborska mesmerizes her readers with poetry that captivates their minds and captures their hearts.

This is the book that her many fans have been anxiously awaiting, including 164 poems in all, as well as the full text of her Nobel acceptance speech of December 7, 1996, in Stockholm. Beautifully translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, who won a 1996 PEN Translation Prize for their work, this volume is a must-have for all readers of poetry.

A delectable and profound collection of poems from Nobel Prize-winner Szymborska (Booklist).

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.

Both plain-spoken and luminous . . . [Szymborska's] is the best of the Western mind--free, restless, questioning. -- New York Times Book Review

A New York Times Editors' Choice

Vast, intimate, and charged with the warmth of a life fully imagined to the end. There's no better place for those unfamiliar with her work to begin.
-- Vogue

One of Europe's greatest poets is also its wisest, wittiest, and most accessible. Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska draws us in with her unexpected, unassuming humor. If you want the world in a nutshell, a Polish critic remarked, try Szymborska. But the world held in these lapidary poems is larger than the one we thought we knew.

​Edited by her longtime, award-winning translator, Clare Cavanagh, Map traces Szymborska's work until her death in 2012. Of the approximately two hundred 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 offers Szymborska's devoted readers a welcome return to her ironic elegance (TheNew Yorker).

Her poems offer a restorative wit as playful as it is steely and as humble as it is wise . . . Her wry acceptance of life's folly remain[s] her strongest weapon against tyranny and bad taste.
-- Los Angeles Times Book Review

In this witty how-to guide, Wislawa Szymborska has nothing but sympathy for the labors of would-be writers generally: I myself started out with rotten poetry and stories, she confesses in this collection of pieces culled from the advice she gave--anonymously--for many years in the well-known Polish journal Literary Life.
She returns time and again to the mundane business of writing poetry properly, that is to say, painstakingly and sparingly. I sigh to be a poet, Miss A. P. from Bialogard exclaims. I groan to be an editor, Szymborska responds.
Szymborska stubbornly insists on poetry's prosaic side Let's take the wings off and try writing on foot, shall we? This delightful compilation, translated by the peerless Clare Cavanagh, will delight readers and writers alike.
Perhaps you could learn to love in prose.

Translated and Introduced by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire Regarded as one of the best representatives since World War II of the rich and ancient art of poetry in Poland, Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012) is, in the translators' words, that rarest of phenomena: a serious poet who commands a large audience in her native land. The seventy poems in this bilingual edition are among the largest and most representative offering of her work in English, with particular emphasis on the period since 1967. They illustrate virtually all her major themes and most of her important techniques.

Describing Szymborka's poetry, Magnus Krynski and Robert Maguire write that her verse is marked by high seriousness, delightful inventiveness, a prodigal imagination, and enormous technical skill. She writes of the diversity, plenitude, and richness of the world, taking delight in observing and naming its phenomena. She looks on with wonder, astonishment, and amusement, but almost never with despair.

A poem by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, illustrated for readers of all ages that will challenge assumptions about falling in love.

They're both convinced / that a sudden passion joined them.
Such certainty is beautiful, / but uncertainty is more beautiful still.

Love at First Sight is a poem about love and chance and destiny by the 1996 Polish winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Illustrated by Italian artist Beatrice Gasca Queirazza, Szymborska's poem comes to life in entirely new ways for her readers and for lovers everywhere in this oversized book perfect for gift giving.

Szymborska tells of two young lovers bound together in an instant--or were they? As the poem unfolds, the reader's assumptions--like those of the lovers themselves--about certainty and destiny are utterly upended, revealing the paradox and mystery of fate. Here is randomness, tricks of memory, and chance, where noticing the smallest details of our intertwined lives is more essential than asking, Are we meant for each other? Every beginning / is only a sequel, after all...

One of the 20th century's great poets, Wislawa Szymborska was a lucid, skilled thinker whose seemingly simple compositions contain sharp insights, irony, and a sense of closeness with the reader. This collection includes both her poetry and prose work.

Wislawa Szymborska era una desconocida en el ámbito hispánico hasta que ganó el premio Nobel en el año 1996. Se editaron entonces sus espléndidos poemas y los lectores en español pudieron descubrir a una de las grandes poetas del siglo XX. Años más tarde se produjo otro descubrimiento igual de extraordinario con la edición de sus prosas. Aparecía entonces una pensadora lúcida, irónica, culta y cercana que con aparente sencillez componía textos afilados y mordaces. Este volumen reúne todos esos textos que vuelven a poner de manifiesto que detrás del premio Nobel no sólo había una excelsa poeta, sino una escritora completa, llena de aristas y resquicios que transitó por los temas más diversos, pero siempre con clarividencia y talento.