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Staring Through the Stitches Helen Vendler

  Staring Through the Stitches Helen Vendler October 8, 1998 issue Reviewed: Poems New and Collected, 1957-1997 by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh Harcourt Brace, 273 pp., $27.00 New Collected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton Bloodaxe Books Ltd./Dufour Editions, 219 pp., $21.95 (paper) Two admirable postwar poets, Wislawa Szymborska (born in 1923 in Poland) and Tomas Tranströmer (born in 1931 in Sweden), troubled by what they saw as the moral insufficiencies of both formal religion and Marxist optimism, have sought spiritual understanding outside organized institutions. Of course, few reflective persons who lived through the same period were exempt from such thoughts. But lyric poets, who may be as aware as any novelist of what is happening in society, must condense social questions into personal ones and must transform written language by giving it rhythmic breath and musical cadence. Both Szymborska and Tranströmer ar...
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Alice Oswald, The Art of Poetry

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Alice Oswald , The Art of Poetry No. 119 Interviewed by Rachael Allen Issue 254, Winter 2025 With Peter Oswald, on a rented houseboat in Wales, 2021. Photograph by Joe Oswald. All photographs courtesy of Alice Oswald.   Most of my conversations with Alice Oswald took place at her home, Adelaide, a ramshackle cottage with a red door in Devon, southwest England. This past January, when I made my first visit, Oswald came to the station to collect me and her octogenarian aunt, who’d taken the same train from London and who lives mostly in the house across from hers. On the drive, the two women discussed whether a flock of birds that had risen from a clearing we’d passed were fieldfares or starlings. Oswald has known Adelaide all her life, having spent holidays there as a child. Her paternal grandmother first lived in the house for a few months with her family at the end of World War I; in 1940, when she was traversing the area by bicycle, looking for a refuge from the bombs targeting B...
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