SOURCE: A review of People on a Bridge, in Choice, Vol. 29, No. 5, January, 1992, p. 752.

[In the review below, Levine briefly compares People on a Bridge to the earlier Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts.]

Szymborska is a distinguished Polish poet, admired for her witty, often wry, coolly intellectual poems—poems that at the same time radiate warmth and, through their attention to the particular, often subvert the intellectual categories through which we view the world. Adam Czerniawski has translated 36 of Szymborska's poems published over the last two decades. The present volume is not the first collection of Szymborska's poems in English translation. Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts, a selection of 70 poems (the earliest of them from the mid-1950s) in translations by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire, was published ten years ago (1981). That volume offered a much richer introduction to Szymborska's poetry, having a more varied and therefore more representative selection...