The Irony of Wislava Szymborska

In London, I remember the indignation.
   Surely the Nobel prize should have gone
to Zbigniew Herbert, the Polish poet we loved
   – dissident, charismatic, much translated –
not some woman we had barely heard of?

I thought Polish poems should resemble films of Wajda,
   charged with the electricity of war.
Szymborska’s poetry held no such glamour.
   She had not played a part in the Resistance.
The poems were almost English in their texture,

a bit like Larkin – though serene
   where he was glum – never
expecting to fill a football stadium.
   Her voice was quieter than Cassandra’s –
but equally we did not listen to her.

Her vision lay in refusing to make patterns
   out of the casual happenstance of fortune
– who survives a massacre, who marries again.
   Of life’s mistakes, she only murmurs sadly
This particular course is never offered twice.