[New-Poetry] Szymborska's 'View': Small Truths Sharply Etched

[JforJames at aol.com]

_http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10721773_ 
(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10721773) 
By Adam Gopnik
Szymborska's 'View': Small Truths Sharply  Etched
 
Audio for this story will be available at approx. 7:00 p.m.  ET

Her poems take small subjects and make much of them. In  her poetry, a child 
about to pull a tablecloth from a table becomes the type of  every scientist 
beginning an experiment. ...”


All Things Considered, June 5, 2007 · Every other year, it seems, the  Nobel 
Prize in literature goes to an obscure European writer, full of hard  
consonants and solemn purposes, whom we all agree to honor for a day and forget  all 
about right after.
 
This list of the Great Obscure is long, but the bright exception to it is  
the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who won the Nobel in 1996. Szymborska is not 
 merely a great writer, like many others; she is a necessary writer, as 
necessary  as toast. Every month, it seems, I give to someone a copy of one of her 
books  and get for her work, in response, not mere admiration or respect but 
eyes  alight with delight, recognition, laughter and that special kind of 
happiness  that comes from seeing a small truth articulated as a sharp ironic 
point, an  emotion given a shape neither all too familiar nor all too  abstract.




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