SOURCE: Review of Miracle Fair: Selected Poems, by Wislawa Szymborska. Virginia Quarterly Review 77, no. 4 (autumn 2001): 146-47.

In the following review, the critic applauds the content and arrangement of Szymborska's poems in Miracle Fair: Selected Poems.

In this collection [Miracle Fair: Selected Poems], the Nobel Prize winning poet presents an array of poems that date back into the 1950's. While they are culled from more than 40 years of work, Szymborska's preoccupations are consistent over time. In fact, Joanna Treciak who translated the pieces from the Polish, has assembled the pieces according to theme and not chronology and that proves to be the strength of this particular volume. Although the pieces are consistently bleak, with poems about hatred and the nearly absurd contingency of violence and violence of contingency, Szymborska's treatment is refreshing and insightful. Her power is in her ability to concentrate our collective gaze on the minutest of...