SOURCE: Franklin, Ruth. Review of Miracle Fair: Selected Poems, by Wisława Szymborska. New Republic 224, no. 23 (4 June 2001): 58-61.

In the following review of Miracle Fair, Franklin remarks on the humor of Szymborska's poetry and mentions a number of her poems that appear in English for the first time in this collection.

It is Wislawa Szymborska's custom to dress up the serious in the costume of comedy. Even her Nobel Lecture began with an ars poetica disguised as a joke. “They say that the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest,” she said. “Well, that one's behind me.” But in fact escape is not so easy, she continued:

I have a feeling that the sentences to come—the third, the sixth, the tenth, and so on, up to the final line—will be just as hard, since I'm supposed to talk about poetry. I've said very little...