Poetry
Wszelki wypadek
Not translated into English
Wisława Szymborska · 1972
Synopsis
Twenty-seven poems, opened by the one that gives the collection its title, in which someone has survived through a chain of coincidences that the poem lists in amazement. The others question in the same way what might have happened and what had to happen: a photograph of a crowd, the letters of the dead, the walk of the resurrected Lazarus, a dinosaur skeleton, a birthday, a conversation with a child, a speech at the lost property office, a praise of dreams, a happy love, and a final poem in which the poet apologises to everyone for not being able to be each of them.
Context
The poet's sixth collection, it appeared in 1972 from Czytelnik, in a volume of forty-five pages, and the critics reviewed it in Kultura, Twórczość and Tygodnik Powszechny. One of her best-known poems, on the nothingness that also turns around for her, takes up a phrase of Heidegger's. The book came after the collections of the sixties, in which she had found her manner, and four years before Wielka liczba.
Who it is for
Short poems in simple language and with a discreet irony, which can be read separately.
Prizes and reception
It brings together several of the poems most loved by its readers, twenty-four years before its author's Nobel Prize.
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