A review by dvlavieri
Here by Wisława Szymborska

3.0

For the longest time I could not appreciate poetry without form. In fact it is probably only in the last year that I have really grown to love and appreciate the style of 'free verse' which seemed to me, before, the realm of lazy poets. However, since then, some free verse poetry have become favorites of mine, Neruda's "Ode to Common Things" and "If You Forget Me" are poems I return to over and over, for their imagery and use of language in a way that, while not conforming to a structure per-se, follow some internal rhythm of their own, some inner logic, illusory contours which trace the subverted patterns of genius. This brilliance is sometimes found in Here by Wislawa Szymborska, but ultimately I was rather disappointed. I was introduced to the Polish poetess rather recently with her poem "First Love" which I thought was a wonderful mix of images and profound self-reflection. Her tone is casual and frank, but at times she chafes on something which seems infinitely wise. I apologize for quoting her a poem which is not in this collection:

They say
the first love's most important.
That's very romantic,
but not my experience.

This appraisal of first loves is very frank, and contrary to the frequent romanticized view of first loves, especially the rosy-glossed images of poets and novelists of the past centuries. She goes on to say:

Other loves
still breathe deep inside me.
This one's too short of breath even to sigh.

How true it is that, really, our first "loves" are barely sighs in us, once it has ended. They are the prelude quickly forgotten, the first swipe, the first attempt which does not count, only for practice. First loves prepare us for our second loves, but they stop there in importance, they are a primer. But Szymborska goes on to relate that these first loves, in fact, are our introduction to death, to ending. It is this first death which is the same as a first love: only practice. If our first loves were true, where real and powerful inside of us, we would never recover from them when they ended - it is that they are superficial and misguided that makes that first ending manageable, which toughens our skins but does not lacerate us, bleed us out.

In Here, there is still such profundity, but the language which pulled me in, the metaphoric power comparing loves to sighs, to breaths, inside of us, which I found ultimately lacking. This collection seemed a bit too political for my tastes, maybe a bit too coldly academic. There are some nice poems collected here, for example "Thoughts That Visit Me on Busy Streets" which begs the question:

Faces.
Billions of faces on the earth's surface.
Each different, so we're told,
from those that have been and will be.
But Nature—since who really understands her?—
may grow tired of her ceaseless labors
and so repeats earlier ideas
by supplying us
with preworn faces.

This is an interesting concept but the imagery becomes quickly tiresome of ancient pharoahs and philosophers in jeans and scarves and sneakers and waving down cabs and picking their noses. There seems to be something lacking, some power of emotion, or some distancing from experience. I have never loved big idea poetry, writing about the abstractness of abstract things, comparing love to dusty white pigeons or bravery to a tawny lion, the apogee of genius to a distant ball of fire, or any of that other metaphorical nonsense which has circled tirelessly in the dryer of poetry, worn thin like old jeans. There is no poem in this collection which I want to commit to memory. That is probably the true test of poetry, of whether it should last. Whether it lives on pages in libraries or in the electronic annals of the internet: that does not matter, that is not life, that is a poor refuge for art. Poetry must live in the minds of the people who read it, who love it, who whisper lines to themselves on busy trains or on bad days when they have forgotten their umbrellas and they're late for work, and it's raining and it's cold. That is poetry, isn't it? I have memorized many lines of many poems: my mind is a sort of hodgepodge of poetic fragments, some which make me laugh, or make me think, or comfort me when I am sad, or lacerate my heart with honesty when I need it; they are collected scraps from all sorts, from Yeats and from Rilke, Neruda and Ronsard, Keats and Shelley, and some bruised and broken pieces of my own (which once or twice I've liked). And I won't be unfair to Mme. Szymborska, she is there too, and maybe this is not her best collection (not for me, anyway), but I have always loved a live from her poem "Nothing Twice" - and even if it is a bit hackneyed sounding or cliche, I will likely always remember it:

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It’s in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.