SOURCE: Rosslyn, Felicity. “Miraculously Normal: Wisława Szymborska.” PN Review 20, no. 5 (May-June 1994): 14-19.

In the following essay, Rosslyn describes Szymborska's apparent indifference to feminism, her fundamental skepticism, her rejection of cliché, and her discovery of the miraculous in the everyday.

As the Polish literary world also adjusts to free market conditions and old reputations are revalued, one thing is becoming clear: the importance of Wislawa Szymborska. She has always been respected, but now she is hugely so, and in the new atmosphere it seems obvious that she stands alongside Herbert as the second great poet of that generation. If critics in the west have been slow to follow this assumption, they have the excuse that she has not always been well translated. The witty tension of her lines hangs rather loose in Czerniawski's recent collection People on a Bridge; her precision is better caught by Krynski and Maguire...