When Wislawa Szymborksa's View with a Grain of Sand, also translated by Stanislaw Baraczak and Clare Cavanagh, was published shortly after its author's award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, the Polish poet, hitherto all but unknown outside her own country, became an international name. More than 10,000 copies of the book have been sold in Britain alone. Yet it was not so much the fame of the prize, as the directness, vigour, wit and honesty with which Szymborska herself writes - qualities deftly captured by her translators - that brought this about. Transcending national and generational boundaries with her rare combination of moral wisdom and down-to-earth manner of speaking to us, she is unquestionably one of the great poetic spirits of the age. Poems New and Collected adds sixty-four new translations to the text of View with a Grain of Sand and includes, as preface, its author's Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

This collection of Szymborska's work reveals her to be concerned with the unglamorized actualities of the human condition. She is one of a generation of Polish poets which witnessed the years of Soviet oppression and spoke for the feelings of the Polish people.

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. The ruins of Troy; sunlight gleaming on a pewter jug; birds returning in the spring; the Abominable Snowman lurking in the Himalayas; a body-building contest; a symphony; a macabre laboratory experiment with a decapitated dog; a postcard from a sister who has "much to tell"; the discovery of a new star; the irrationality of love; the infinity of (pi).

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-the definitive, complete collection of poetry by the Nobel Prize-winning poet, 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.

These twenty-seven poems consider life on earth, from the microbe to the apocalypse. Along the way they take in, among other objects of study, the human teenager, divorce, Ella Fitzgerald, Vermeer's Milkmaid, dreams, traffic accidents, Greek statues, television miniseries, the vagaries of memory, Madame Atropos, and even poetry writing. A book to treasure, from a virtuoso of form, line, and thought.
PRAISE FOR WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA
"Accessible and deeply human . . . A poet to live with." --Robert Hass
"She teaches us how the world defies and evades the names we give it." --Edward Hirsch
"A subtle, even a subversive muse of vulnerability and a great European poet." --Richard Howard
"Satisfying and original . . . Extremely smart, witty, and levelheaded, Szymborska] seduces us with her wide range of interests, her atypical lack of narcissism for a poet, and her cheerful pessimism." --Charles Simic

One of Europe's greatest recent poets is also its wisest, wittiest, and most accessible. Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska draws us in with her unexpected, unassuming humour. Her elegant, precise poems pose questions we never thought to ask. "If you want the world in a nutshell," a Polish critic remarks, "try Szymborska." But the world held in these lapidary poems is larger than the one we thought we knew. Carefully edited by her long time, award winning translator, Clare Cavanagh, the poems in Map trace Szymborska's work until her death in 2012. Of the approximately two hundred and 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 is the first English publication of Szymborska's work since the acclaimed Here, and it offers her devoted readers a welcome return to her "ironic elegance" (The New Yorker).

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.

Wislawa Szymborska's poems are admired around the world, and her unsparing vision, tireless wit, and deep sense of humanity are cherished by countless readers. Unknown to most of them, however, Szymborska also worked for several decades as a columnist, reviewing a wide variety of books under the unassuming title "Nonrequired Reading."
As readers of her poems would expect, the short prose pieces collected here are anything but ordinary. Reflecting the author's own eclectic tastes and interests, the pretexts for these ruminations range from books on wallpapering, cooking, gardening, and yoga, to more lofty volumes on opera and world literature. Unpretentious yet incisive, these charming pieces are on a par with Szymborska's finest lyrics, tackling the same large and small questions with a wonderful curiosity.