View with a Grain of Sand by Wisława Szymborska

I first came across her work through one one of her most characteristic poems, ‘Slapstick’:įrom the waist up, starch and aspirations It is the voice of one who has come home from shopping with an unshakeable thought in their mind and the armoury with which to express it. It is as disarming as it can be disturbing. Lying somewhere between the sympathetic and the sardonic, given to viewing the ordinary through surprising perspectives, it gives the reader a strong sense of a distinctive, engaging character, who mocks herself as much as she mocks the predicament of everyone. Szymborska was a poet with a very particular voice. Of your children, only those who were born … Of your loves, mention only the marriage Shaky memories give way to unshakeable dates. It reveals the poetic world that we, too often unwittingly, actually inhabit, because it is we who must make the poetry:Ĭoncise, well-chosen facts are de rigueur. It is the poetry of an enquiry triggered by the banalities of modern living. Time and again in her poetry she catches the reader’s attention from the start, with an arresting observation triggered by the the kind of mundane thoughts we all can share but few turn into poetry: Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012), author of ‘Vermeer’, winner of a Nobel prize in 1996, is a poet of the eternal made manifest in the everyday.

Ah, now I see the bowl, the pitcher, the woman, the grasp of art’s eternity. It needs the poet’s eye to say what may be sensed around us, to find the meaningful in the accidental, to give us the thoughts we had not understood before they were pointed out to us. Maybe at times I sense the poetry, but for the most part it remains unspoken. It looks out at me from every picture on the wall. It is in the carpet, the rug, the floorboards beneath. It is in the arrangement of books, papers and random objects arranged across the desk. It is in the cup from which I have just drunk. So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum Johannes Vermeer, ‘The Milkmaid’ (c.1660)

View with a Grain of Sand by Wisława Szymborska