A generous selection from Wisława Szymborska, one of the great poets of the twentieth century and winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature.

 Her poems begin with apparently modest things — a grain of sand, a museum object, a bodybuilder, a photograph, an animal, a historical anecdote — and then prise them open until questions of chance, death, history, knowledge and human absurdity start leaking out. She is philosophical without ever becoming heavy-handed: dry, exact, sceptical, very funny, and unusually good at making huge ideas arrive disguised as small observations.

View with a Grain of Sand gathers poems from across several decades of Szymborska’s work and was the first substantial English selection to show the breadth of her writing. It includes pieces such as “Brueghel’s Two Monkeys,” “Museum,” “The Tower of Babel,” “The Acrobat” and “Bodybuilders’ Contest.” The translations by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh are the pair most closely associated with establishing Szymborska’s English-language reputation.

Faber and Faber, London, 1996. First British edition. Paperback. Translated from the Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh. Light shelf wear and minor handling marks to covers; faint rubbing to edges and corners. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Very good condition.