Timeline

• Mar 19, 2026: started reading.
• May 01, 2026: finished reading.

Review

I now know — rather definitively — that it was a mistake to be introduced to Szymborksa via Nonrequired Reading. Szymborska’s brief reviews of anything and everything under the sun were clever and quaint, but stacked end to end they became tedious.

Her poetry, however, defies easy description. It was fun to read this large collection and watch her become more adept at her craft with each new collection. I don’t know that I’ve every read a poet, or writer for that matter, that uses such “straightforward” language and focuses on fairly mundane subjects yet somehow manages to be some of the most profound, incisive poetry of the 20th c. And this is in translation! Those of us deficient in Polish comprehension can only shake our heads and wonder at what she must be doing in the native tongue.

I was having trouble articulating the feeling of reading her poetry until a little over half way through this collection, she gave away part of the secret when she wrote the lines:

Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.
— p142

This is exactly it. The poems seem light, almost conversational in their directness, but they inevitably sneak up on you and play a trick you couldn’t have expected. She somehow managing to invert the world you thought you understood.

Take for an example her poem titled “Experiment,” which describes a short film that played before a movie on the subject of a decapitated dog (details are light, you don’t even realize it’s about a dog at first). At first the poem seems to be merely descriptive, but there’s an abrupt turn and the final two stanzas confront you with a profound existential question:

A dog’s faithful head,
a dog’s friendly head
squinted its eyes when stroked,
convinced that it was still part of a whole
that crooks its back if patted
and wags its tail.

I thought about happiness and was frightened.
For if that’s all life is about,
the head
was happy.
— p152

Or less, less macabre, when she’s describing a quiet moment sitting by the river, a premise which might risk falling into the rote clichés of romanticism, but which instead becomes a stepping off point for a profound meditation on the “tapestry of circumstance” that is created by merely existing in a single space and a given time:

So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone,
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is none other than itself, no one else’s but its own.

When I see such things, I’m no longer sure
that what’s important
is more important than what’s not.
— p226

I have a habit of dog-earing a page if I think something is particularly good and I’ll want to come back and reference and re-read it later. When I finished this collection, I realized I had dog-eared nearly a dozen pages and written “wow,” “perfect,” and “oh my god.” in the margins countless more times.

If you’re reading this review, you shouldn’t be content just to read these choice experts. You can’t truly understand what it’s like to read a Szymborska poem until you’ve read one in its entirety, re-read it, stared into empty space, and re-read it a third time trying to understand what it is about her words that keeps it still gnawing at the edges of your mind.