Here Paperback – August 7, 2012

The slimmest of slim volumes of poetry, "Here" by Wislawa Szymborska contains 27 works offered for our delectation. The page count is 84, half filled with the poems in their original Polish language and half in fine translations by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak. The book was published just two years prior to the poet's death at age 88 in 2012.The writer and critic Adam Gopnik says the effect of a typical Szymborska poem is like encountering a "happy collaboration between Ogden Nash and Emily Dickinson." Gopnik's one word for her work is "charming."Through the lens of "Here" I see things differently. Although consistent with her body of work, there's something especially attractive about these late-in-llife poems. The word I myself would attach to the dominant strain in these poems is "whimsical" -- playfully quaint and fanciful, especially in an appealing way. In choosing that word I also have in mind the phenomena of "whims," those odd ideas that take over the brain and imagination very suddenly.And so Szymborska begins a poem with the question, "Me -- a teenager?" and speculates what it would be like to meet her own seventy-year-younger self. Then she begins another poem by blurting out, "Why not, let's take the Foraminifera" -- and proceeds to wonder whether those tiny limestone-shelled sea creatures were/are, ultimately, dead/alive. Later, confident that nothing's lost by revealing the name of the game, she titles a new poem, "Thoughts That Visit Me On Busy Streets." You get the feeling Szymborska and Frank O'Hara (author of  Lunch Poems (City Lights Pocket Poets Series) ) could have been pals.This may sound odd, but instead of Nash and Dickinson, the voice I hear in "Here" is a kindred spirit to the sharpest of our contemporary stand-up comedians, the men and women who mix biting social/political commentary with quotidian observational humor, acolytes of the late George Carlin, not just on subjects of pain, death, and war, but in the category of material Carlin called "the little world." Among Szymborska's favorite words are "astonish" and its variants, applied to this world, this life.Astonishments are what she itemizes in the poem whose title she also assigned to the volume as a whole: "Here." One of the poem's 51 lines stands as a neat summarization: "Life on Earth is quite a bargain." Like a meticulous lawyer, she lays out her argument point by point. Consider, for example --"Like nowhere else, or almost nowhere,you're given your own torse here,equipped with the accessories requiredfor adding your own children to the rest.Not to mention arms, legs, and astounded head."The American comic and actor Louis C.K. occupies the same ground (albeit more profanely), as when he observes in "Oh My God," his 2013 comedy album [not available on Amazon] --"I like life. I like it. I feel that even if it ends up being short, I got lucky to have it.Because life is an amazing gift when you think about what you get with a basic life.Here's your boiler-plate deal with life ... what you get when you get life:You get to be on earth.First of all, Oh my God, what a location! ...You get to [make love]! that's part of the deal!Where else are you going to get that deal?"By the end of her life Szymborska had armed herself with a ready answer to the rude question many interviewers posed: Why have you written so few poems? She replied: "A poem written in the evening is read again in the morning. It does not always survive." Now, once you've read "Here" or other collections of her work, your perception is likely change in a way that allows you to understand how Szymborskiac this seemingly tossed-off response is. It reveals one writer's writing habits, of course. But listen to it again. How much contingency it contains, how much a reminder of love (passion expecting to last ... ) and death ( ... yet only to disappear).

Love the photo on the cover! Excellent modern poetry.

When Szymborska (b. 1923) won the Nobel Prize in 1996, we had View With a Grain of Sand. This survey sampled her work from 1957 to 1993 and firmly supported the wisdom of the Nobel committee's decision. Shortly after, there came Poems, New and Collected, which added about 60 pages of poems from 1957-1993 and 7 poems written between 1993 and 1997. Now, the same translators (Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak) bring us Here. You should be cautioned: this is a facing-page book of translations; its 85 pages of poetry amount to only 42 pages of new poem. As any sane person would expect, these poems are mellower and deeper. There are echoes of "The Joy of Writing," "Theatre Impressions," and "Under One Small Star," poems that I know intimately from reciting them over the last ten years at open-mic poetry readings. I think I would characterize this mellower voice as "don't worry; things work out." It's not a blind naivete by any stretch of the imagination. It is the voice of a great poet in her eighth decade, representing a life lived out during a truly bizarre, I'd say self-destructive, century. She says, ekphrastically, "So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum / in painted quiet and concentration / keeps pouring milk day after day / from the pitcher to the bowl / the World hasn't earned / the world's end." (Vermeer, p. 55) The photo on the cover says it all.

The English -- all I could read -- showed sharp, accessible perceptions and first-class restraint. I enjoyed every poem. I shall look for more

I really enjoyed her unique perspective. I relaxed reading her poems in the evenings. I look forward to reading more of her works,

Reading Szymborska's work makes a lot of readers regret they don't know Polish.Her poems is very versatile in topics.They're beautiful but not fancy,down to earth but not cruel.Some lines are so ingeniously written that it almost seems like she's whispering them to you as a close friend sitting right next to you.It still strike me how she manage to express so much, with such width and mindfulness in so few words.I guess the world, seeing all the malicious acts and minds in it everyday, decides we should have Szymborska for a break.Sit back and enjoy.

Her words and wit astonish.What a treasure for her to come to us in English!Her humor is anchoring and salvation.

I so often laugh softly and learn deeply. Read her.

Bought as a gift for a friend, who wasn't familiar with Szymborska. She liked it. Contains the original Polish poems and the English translation next to it. Szymborska at her best!

Economical, humane and entertaining, Szymborska creates poems that are like patches of clear sky and sunlight on a cloudy day, elegant, eloquent and elegiac.

Very recommend to everyone.

Brilliant, as always. What else can you say about Szymborska?

A great fun reading Szymborska's poems in both Polish and English.