There are poets whose work, when we first encounter it, changes our conception of what poetry can be and do. Wistawa Szymborska was one such poet.
Szymborska is one of the greatest of the great generation of post-World War 2 Polish poets, whose poetics was forged in the horror and bitter disillusionment of the war and its aftermath. Brigitta Trotzig put this beautifully in her Presentation Speech when Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature: for Szymborska ”the starting point is the experience of a catastrophe, the ground caving in beneath her, the complete collapse of a faith.”
But this devastation leads ultimately to a clearing away of things; a radical openness and honesty; and rejection of false comfort, of prettification; a determination to see things as they are; and to express them in “a language that makes things relative, a language that methodically start from scratch”.
The result, in the words of Robert Hass, is poetry that is “accessible and deeply human and a joy—though it is a dark kind of joy”
Here is her poem “Returning Birds”.
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