Staring Through the Stitches
Staring Through the Stitches | Helen Vendler | The New York Review of Books NYBooks Logo. Link to Homepage My Account Logout Site logo Politics Collapse Literature Collapse Arts Collapse Ideas Collapse Current Issue Current Issue More from the Review Events All Issues About Us Shop Literary Gifts Shop NYRB Classics 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 l...