Critical Essay | Critical Review by Michael Glover

Critical Review by Michael Glover

SOURCE: Glover, Michael. Review of View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems, by Wisława Szymborska. New Statesman 125, no. 4309 (8 November 1996): 48.

In the following review of View with a Grain of Sand, Glover notes Szymborska's relative obscurity in the English-speaking world prior to her 1996 Nobel award.

There were two kinds of response to the news that the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska had won this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. One was outrage, ably expressed by the Swedish literary agent who said that the whole notion of the prize had by now been debased if it could be awarded to so “insular” and obscure a figure. The other was an audible gulp on the part of literary editors, followed, half an hour's meagre research later, by obsequious endorsement expressed in suitably opaque mumbo-jumbo—opacity was, of course, necessary because very few of them had ever read a...
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