At The New Republic, Ruth Franklin celebrates the work of the late Wislawa Szymborska, and explores the brilliance of Polish poetry throughout the last half-century.

“Assuming that there weren’t any mind-altering chemicals in the run-off from Nowa Huta, the notoriously polluted steelworks outside Krakow (where Szymborska spent nearly her entire life), we can only conclude that Poland’s postwar poetic greatness was largely a historical accident—the collision of a deep and enduring literary culture with Europe’s ghastliest battleground.”

(Via The Book Bench)