SOURCE: A review of People on a Bridge, in World Literature Today, Vol. 66, No. 1, Winter, 1992, pp. 163-64.

[In the following review, Carpenter finds People on a Bridge "subtle, witty, and ironic."]

Long recognized in Poland as a leading voice in contemporary Polish poetry, Wislawa Szymborska has not achieved the same popularity in the English-speaking world as other poets of her generation such as Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rózewicz. Still, People on a Bridge is not the first introduction of Szymborska's verse to English readers. Czeslaw Milosz included poems by her in his seminal anthology Postwar Polish Poetry (1965), and in 1981 Princeton University Press published a selection of her poems translated by Magnus Krynski and Robert Maguire. Let us hope that the present volume, a welcome addition to those earlier translations, will help bring Szymborska the recognition that she deserves.

The poems selected by Adam Czerniawski come from four...