SOURCE: Review of Poems New and Collected, 1957-1997, by Wisława Szymborska. Publishers Weekly 245, no. 13 (30 March 1998): 77.

In the following review of Szymborska's Poems New and Collected, 1957-1997, the critic praises the work's expert translation and comprehensiveness.

“Whatever else we might think of this world—it is astonishing,” writes the Krakow native in her 1996 Nobel Lecture, and her poems continually testify to this astonishment at the world's good and evil, which she often juxtaposes. Expertly translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak, this edition collects, as they note, “virtually all of Szymborska's work to date”; in sheer quantity and in quality, it supplants all others. Like her compatriots Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rozewicz, Szymborska is intensely aware in her seven books (from Calling Out to Yeti in 1957 through The End and the Beginning in 1993) of her own belatedness in writing about the Holocaust—particularly in the bitter, uncompromising “Still...