Will I love Map?

After photographers, poets have the sharpest eyes for the goings on and minutiae of life around them.

I love Szymborska’s poetry because with her, I walk down unknown streets, I eavesdrop conversations, I dissect a terrorist bombing. If photography helps open your eyes, Szymborska’s intimate yet vast vision opens a higher mind. She shows me life through her eyes: often puzzled, sometimes bemused, but always loving.

I love Map as it’s a generous collection of her luminous works with her last poems. Map is the final poem; it closes with the lines "… they spread before me a world /not… show more.

I take book-breaks. Moments apart from deluging news and dataism. Pause; slip away. The moments become a matter of life and breath. What’re you doing now? people sometimes ask. Heeding a call in a writer.

 Map is a book that asks for this kind of heeding. It collects Szymborska’s patient, wise poems. Restorative in their incisive elegance and wit, her poetry reminds you of the almost lost art of wit—which asks you to recognize foibles, treasure perceptions of the transitory.

These poems offer rare episodes when amused awareness and passing incidents turn luminous; and where nothing is (paradoxically) transcended… show more.