"In these 100 poems Wislawa Szymborska portrays a world of astonishing diversity and richness, in which nature is wise and prodigal and fate unpredictable, if not mischievous. With acute irony tempered by a generous curiosity, she documents life's improbability as well as its transient beauty. The ruins of Troy; sunlight gleaming on a pewter jug; birds returning in the spring; the Abominable Snowman lurking in the Himalayas; a body-building contest; a symphony; a macabre laboratory experiment with a decapitated dog; a postcard from a sister who has "much to tell"; the discovery of a new star; the irrationality of love; the infinity of [pi]."--BOOK JACKET.

Brueghel's Two Monkeys Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition Nothing Twice Museum A Moment in Troy Clochard Vocabulary Travel Elegy An Unexpected Meeting Rubens' Women Coloratura Bodybuilders' Contest Poetry Reading The Tower of Babel Water Conversation with a Stone The Joy of Writing Landscape Family Album The Railroad Station Born Soliloquy for Cassandra A Byzantine Mosaic Beheading Pieta Returning Birds Thomas Mann Tarsier The Acrobat A Palaeolithic Fertility Fetish No End of Fun Could Have Theatre Impressions Voices The Letters of the Dead Advertisement Going Home Discovery Dinosaur Skeleton Birthday Allegro ma non troppo Autotomy Frozen Motion The Classic In Praise of Dreams True Love Under One Small Star A Large Number Thank-You Note Psalm

Lot's Wife Seen from Above Experiment Smiles The Terrorist, He's Watching A Medieval Miniature In Praise of My Sister Hermitage Evaluation of an Unwritten Poem Warning The Onion The Suicide's Room In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself On the Banks of the Styx Utopia Pi Archeology View with a Grain of Sand Clothes On Death, without Exaggeration In Broad Daylight Our Ancestors' Short Lives Hitler's First Photograph The Century's Decline Children of Our Age Tortures Plotting with the Dead Writing a Resume Funeral An Opinion on the Question of Pornography A Tale Begun Into the Ark Miracle Fair The People on the Bridge Sky No Title Required The End and the Beginning Hatred Reality Demands Elegiac Calculation Cat in an Empty Apartment Parting with a View Seance Love at First Sight May 16, 1973 Maybe All This Slapstick Nothing's a Gift One Version of Events We're Extremely Fortunate.