Map: Collected and Last Poems

Front Cover
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015 - Poetry - 447 pages
A new collected volume from the Nobel Prize-winning poet that includes, for the first time in English, all of the poems from her last Polish collection

One of Europe's greatest recent poets is also its wisest, wittiest, and most accessible. Nobel Prize-winner Wislawa Szymborska draws us in with her unexpected, unassuming humor. Her elegant, precise poems pose questions we never thought to ask. "If you want the world in a nutshell," a Polish critic remarks, "try Szymborska." But the world held in these lapidary poems is larger than the one we thought we knew.

Carefully edited by her longtime, award-winning translator, Clare Cavanagh, the poems in Map trace Szymborska's work until her death in 2012. Of the approximately two hundred and fifty poems included here, nearly forty are newly translated; thirteen represent the entirety of the poet's last Polish collection, Enough, never before published in English.
Map is the first English publication of Szymborska's work since the acclaimed Here, and it offers her devoted readers a welcome return to her "ironic elegance" (The New Yorker).
 

Contents

From Why We Live 1952
7
From Questions You Ask Yourself 1954
11
Calling Out to Yeti 1957
17
Salt 1962
57
No End of Fun 1967
107
Could Have 1972
153
A Large Number 1976
195
The People on the Bridge 1986
235
Moment 2002
319
Colon 2005
353
Here 2009
385
Enough 2011
415
Back Matter
435
Back Flap
449
Back Cover
450
Spine
451

The End and the Beginning 1993
279

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About the author (2015)

STANSILAW BARANCZAK, born in Poland in 1946, was a poet, literary critic, scholar, editor, translator and lecturer. He received numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Felllowship, and translated many seminal works--including the work of William Shakespeare, E.E. Cummings, and Emily Dickinson--from English into Polish.

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