View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems
Szymborska's poems have the air of casual observation that turns out to be devastating. She addresses a grain of sand, a cat in an empty apartment, a terrorist's second before the bomb goes off. Her irony is warm rather than cold; her philosophical curiosity is matched by a humor that prevents her work from being merely didactic. Nobel Prize 1996. The most beloved Polish poet of the century after Milosz.
Szymborska's signature move, the modest observation that pivots into irony, is marvelous once and predictable by the fortieth poem; a selected volume puts the mechanism under glass. You are also reading Barańczak and Cavanagh's English, graceful but shorn of the Polish wordplay. The poems survive translation. The surprise, which is most of the engine, often does not.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
