SOURCE: A review of View with a Grain of Sand, in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 72, No. 1, Winter, 1996, p. 29.

[In the review below, the critic briefly considers Szymborska's poetic style.]

"So much world all at once—how it rustles and bustles!" Szymborska is constantly amazed and challenged by life's plenty, and in capturing it in language, her poems employ all the "inventiveness / bounty, sweep, exactitude, / sense of order—gifts that border / on witchcraft and wizardry" that she praises in life itself. Though claiming only to have "borrowed from the truth," Szymborska writes lyrics that build from small details, such as a grain of sand, into visions of the wider universe. Her styles, like her subjects, are many, ranging from satire to elegy, meditation to play. She is especially deft at composing brief, spare allegories that have all the emotional force of extended narratives. In rendering this multi-faceted Polish...