Map: Collected and Last Poems - Hardcover

Szymborska, Wislawa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0544126025 ISBN 13: 9780544126022

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015

Synopsis

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).

About this title

From the Inside Flap

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 poets, Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska was also its wisest, wittiest, and most accessible. With unexpected humor, her elegant, precise poems pose questions we never thought to ask. “If you want the world in a nutshell,” a Polish critic has remarked, “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 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).

From the Back Cover

Praise for Wislawa Szymborksa:
 
“Extremely smart, witty, and level-headed, [Szymborska] seduces us with her wide range of interests, her atypical lack of narcissism for a poet, and her cheerful pessimism.” — New York Review of Books

“Her poems offer a restorative wit as playful as it is steely and as humble as it is wise. Most poets jostle for center stage, but Szymborska looks on from afar, her wry acceptance of life’s folly remaining her strongest weapon against tyranny and bad taste.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Refreshingly direct but always surprising, her poems keep taking us to further, unexpected perspectives.” — O, the Oprah Magazine
“Dark, complex, and profoundly intelligent.” — Washington Post
 
“[She] captures the nightmarish contingency of human survival, and the human callousness toward nature, with an ironic elegance miraculously free of bitterness.” — The New Yorker

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0544126025
• ISBN 13: 9780544126022
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464