Map: Collected and Last Poems - Paperback

by Wislawa Szymborska (Author)

"Both plain-spoken and luminous . . . [Szymborska's] is the best of the Western mind--free, restless, questioning." -- New York Times Book Review

A New York Times Editors' Choice

"Vast, intimate, and charged with the warmth of a life fully imagined to the end. There's no better place for those unfamiliar with her work to begin."
-- Vogue

One of Europe's greatest poets is also its wisest, wittiest, and most accessible. Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska draws us in with her unexpected, unassuming humor. "If you want the world in a nutshell," a Polish critic remarked, "try Szymborska." But the world held in these lapidary poems is larger than the one we thought we knew.

​Edited by her longtime, award-winning translator, Clare Cavanagh, Map traces Szymborska's work until her death in 2012. Of the approximately two hundred 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 offers Szymborska's devoted readers a welcome return to her "ironic elegance" (TheNew Yorker).

"Her poems offer a restorative wit as playful as it is steely and as humble as it is wise . . . Her wry acceptance of life's folly remain[s] her strongest weapon against tyranny and bad taste."
-- Los Angeles Times Book Review

Front Jacket

A new collected volume from the Nobel Prize winning poet that includes, for the first time in English, all of the poems from her last Polish collection

One of Europe s greatest poets, Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska was also its wisest, wittiest, and most accessible. With unexpected humor, her elegant, precise poems pose questions we never thought to ask. If you want the world in a nutshell, a Polish critic has remarked, try Szymborska. But the world held in these lapidary poems is larger than the one we thought we knew.

Carefully edited by her longtime, award-winning translator, Clare Cavanagh, the poems inMaptrace Szymborska s work until her death in 2012. Of the approximately two hundred 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.

Mapis the first English publication of Szymborska s work since the acclaimedHere, and it offers her devoted readers a welcome return to her ironic elegance (The New Yorker)."

Back Jacket

Praise for Wislawa Szymborksa:

Extremely smart, witty, and level-headed, [Szymborska] seduces us with her wide range of interests, her atypical lack of narcissism for a poet, and her cheerful pessimism. New York Review of Books

Her poems offer a restorative wit as playful as it is steely and as humble as it is wise. Most poets jostle for center stage, but Szymborska looks on from afar, her wry acceptance of life s folly remaining her strongest weapon against tyranny and bad taste. Los Angeles Times Book Review

Refreshingly direct but always surprising, her poems keep taking us to further, unexpected perspectives. O, the Oprah Magazine
Dark, complex, and profoundly intelligent. Washington Post

[She] captures the nightmarish contingency of human survival, and the human callousness toward nature, with an ironic elegance miraculously free of bitterness. The New Yorker"

Author Biography

WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA (1923-2012) was born in Poland and worked as a poetry editor, translator, and columnist. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996.
CLARE CAVANAGH received an NBCC award for criticism and a PEN Translation Award for her work, with STANISLAW BARANCZAK, on Szymborska's poetry.