Ordinariness and Resacralisation: The Example of Wislawa Szymborka

Abstract

We would like to share with you some of our work on the recent poems of Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1996. We do so both because the work is beautiful and and because it brings a different perspective to these energised conversations. Much of what we have been talking about has involved a sense of the openness of landscape and therefore of the transcendent nature of sacred space. We have tended to talk in terms of the openness and diversity of landscape, as of the Australian land - its physical and cultural diversity, its European grids and Aboriginal songlines, even a "New World" sense of frontier as in America. Eastern European landscape and writing, however, have faced a different set of issues.