FLASHBACK: Wislawa Szymborska (1923- ), View with a Grain of Sand, Harcourt Brace, 1995, 214 words

This week, we look back on great works by poets little known in the United States, but widely acknowledged as literary giants elsewhere.
This magnificent collection from Polish essayist and poet Wislawa Szymborska likely contributed to her winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. View with a Grain of Sand, a selection of her work spanning 1957-1993, hits most of the highpoints that made this poet one of the most popular in Europe.
Her fame as a poet is even more amazing considering her poetic output is fairly slim, about 250 poems total to date.
View with a Grain of Sand captures selections from seven previous volumes, though the focus is on later work such as The End and the Beginning (1993) and A Large Number (1972).
If there is any one theme of Szymborska's poetry, it's the grandness of life's small moments. She best known for employing literary devices like irony and understatement to illuminate great philosophical obsessions, and this collection does a fine job of providing a reader unfamiliar with this poet a window into those major themes.
The title poem, from her collection The People on the Bridge (1986), is an ideal example of both Szymborska's use of irony and her existential focus on the everyday. In it, the narrator explains that nature - sand, lakes, sky - are connected to us only through our own experience, that nature itself has only the interest or concern for us as we apply to it. She writes of a grain of sand: "Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it. / it doesn't feel itself seen or touched. / And that it fell on the windowsill / is only our experience, not its."
The reader can also come away understanding Szymborska's amazing growth as a poet. Her early work is tentative and immature. In Calling Out to Yeti (1957) Szymborska is too careful, stumbling over her metaphors. In "Nothing Twice," a poem about fleeting life, she forces clumsy rhymes: "It's in its nature not to stay: / Today is always gone tomorrow."
The volume does leave out any mention of her two earliest collections, no doubt to avoid any controversy among the Nobel Committee considering her for the reward the following year. She was a loyal Stalinist in Poland in the early 1950s. And though she walked away from her Socialist ideology and renounced her early political work, a complete picture of this poet would have included her poems dedicated to Lenin and the glories of industrial construction.
For the reader interested in the human condition, Szymborska has been around long enough to know what she's talking about. View with a Grain of Sand is a worthy collection from one of Europe's most popular poets.