The publisher's note says: "These intimate, immediate poems were written during the precarious years of Soviet occupation in Poland. Rooted in the pains and joys of the everyday, they ask us what it means to live out our lives amid global conflict and its aftermath."
The note adds: "Underlying Szymborska’s work is a continual sense of astonishment at having survived, as well as the disbelief and delight that life goes on – that the acrobat’s hands have caught the trapeze."
Reviewing the volume in The Guardian, critic Rowland Bagnall wrote: "Reflecting the turbulent history of Poland in the 20th century, Szymborska describes life both during and after conflict, documenting the violence of war alongside moments of resilience and poignant domesticity. With plainspoken wisdom and deadpan humour, these poems celebrate the ordinary in extraordinary times."
In 1996, Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality."
Her Nobel Prize acceptance speech is included in the English edition of The Acrobat as an afterword. In it, she said: "It looks as though poets will always have their work cut out for them."
Szymborska’s books include View with a Grain of Sand, Here, Monologue of a Dog, Map: Collected and Last Poems, and Poems New and Collected: 1957-1997.
She died in 2012, at the age of 88.
(mk/gs)