Monologue of a Dog by Wisława Szymborska

There's fate and fate. Mine changed abruptly.
One spring came
and he wasn't there.
All hell broke loose at home.
Suitcases, chests, trunks, crammed into cars.
The wheels squealed tearing downhill
and fell silent round the bend.

After reading How to Start Writing (and When to Stop), I was curious about the poetry of author Wisława Szymborska, who, in a surprisingly turn, won the Nobel in 1996 after writing popular but largely regionally-known poetry for nearly 6 decades. 

It's interesting to read a collection like this after reading something like How to Start Writing, with its acerbic tone and ironical wit. I wondered if Szymborska's own poetry would live up to her own advice. I can imagine the recipients of some of her bon mots secretly hoping it wouldn't; alas for them, the poems in this slim volume are, to use a literally term, straight bangers.

The title poem, which I've excerpted above, opens the collection and is the clear standout. Over the course of the poem, it moves from pastoral animal poetry into something much bigger and broader: revolution, the cruelties of history, the tragedies of the simple lives caught up in time's tumultuous passage. And it does all this without ever leaving the head of the titular canine. If you read nothing else of this review, do yourself a favor and click the link above.

The other poems often follow a similar structure. From a simple and small scale starting point they often blossom out thematically to encompass far more than their ostensible subjects. A baby pulling a tableclose becomes a meditation on physics and entropy; a series of short aphorisms about statistics turns toward existential loneliness; a survey of epochal time gives way to the infinity of an instant. 

But lest this all sound weighty and tedious--and any poetry lover can conjure a hundred great poets are often just this--Szymborska's style is never less than approachable. As she recommended in her column, she never chooses to obscure when speaking straight will do. Mystery and ambiguity are in these pieces, around the edges, but she isn't interested in obscurity. It struck me while reading how often poetry is spoken of as something that can make the familiar unfamiliar, and how rarely that occurs; but here, in free verse lines anyone can read, Szymborska does just that.