title: View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems
author:  Wislawa Szymborska 
description: True, the gentlemen of the Swedish Academy have made more than their share of bloopers. But when they bestowed the Nobel Prize upon Wislawa Szymborska in 1996, they got it right, rescuing a major poet from minor obscurity. Two previous collections of her work had appeared in English, of course. Yet <i>View with a Grain of Sand</i> is by far the best introduction to the Polish writer, conveying not only the fantastic lightness of her touch but the entire worlds she manages to pack into, as it were, a grain of sand. Miniscule wonders are her specialty, such as the tableau she records in "Miracle Fair": "The usual miracle: / invisible dogs barking / in the dead of night. / One of many miracles: / a small and airy cloud / is able to upstage the massive moon." Yet Szymborska is also a love poet of peculiar tartness:
zlib_text: ![](Images/image00542.jpeg)
  
  **ALSO BY JULIE ORRINGER**
  
  _How to Breathe Underwater_
  
  _For the Zahav brothers_
  
  _O tempora! O mores! O mekkora nagy coresz_.
  
  O the times! O the customs! O what tremendous tsuris.--from _Marsh Marigold_ ,
  
  a Hungarian Labor Service newspaper,
  
  Banhida Labor Camp, 1939From Bulgaria thick wild cannon pounding rolls,
  
  It strikes the mountain ridge, then hesitates and falls.
  
  A piled-up blockage of thoughts, animals, carts, and men;
  
  whinnying, the road rears up; the sky runs with its mane.
  
  In this chaos of movement you're in me, permanent,
  
  deep in my consciousness you shine, motion forever spent
  
  and mute, like an angel awed by death's great carnival,
  
  or an insect in rotted tree pith, staging its funeral.--Miklos Radnoti, from
  "Picture
  
  Postcards,"
  
  written to his wife during his death march from Heidenau, 1944It is
  
  as though I lay
  
  under a low
  
  sky and breathed
  
  through a needle's eye.--W. G. Sebald
  
  from _Unrecounted_
  
  **CONTENTS**
  
  PART ONE:The Stree