Wislawa Szymborska died on February 1st. Read died on February 1st. Read Adam Gopnik , and see Szymborska in our archive at Double Take . Photograph by Alberto Cristofari/A3/Contrasto/Redux.

It was only the other morning that my wife, happening to leaf again through “Here,” the most recent gathering of Wislawa Szymborska’s poems, remarked, looking at the cover photograph of the eighty-something-year-old Polish poet, the writer’s eyes shut in private bliss, cigarette in hand, “You know, I’m worried about Szymborska. I wish she would stop smoking.” This remark—made, of course, by someone who had never come anywhere near the poet’s fleshly, personal presence—was a sign of the effect that Szymborska had on her readers. They thought of her as a friend and neighbor and counsellor—as someone to worry about, and worry with, more than someone to merely pay the blank tribute of “admiration.” She had no mere “admirers,” really, though her friends and fans, in this American neighborhood alone, ran from Jane Hirshfeld and Billy Collins to Woody Allen.

Of course, obituaries are not—or shouldn’t be—a competitive sport, so we shouldn’t spend too long complaining that the New York Times, this morning, announcing her death—from lung cancer, just as my wife had feared and the photo presaged—badly underplayed it, pushing her off to the margins with a much shorter notice than they gave the death of the artist Mike Kelley. Bitching about obituaries (to invent a rather Szymborksian title for a poem) is a mug’s game, so: not too long—but a moment. A poem of hers should have appeared on the front page, but, allowing that that’s too much to ask, the notice might have given those unfamiliar with her work some sense of why she mattered so much. Nothing in the Times obit—which oddly made much of her early unimportant political writing and was inadvertently chauvinist in its implication that the Nobel Prize overburdened her in a way that it might not have some other, more burly, pundit-minded male writer—would give a non-Szymborska-reader a clear sense of why she won it, or why hers was perhaps the one recent “obscure” Nobel in Literature to which everyone who knew the author’s work already assented. (Everyone who didn’t know her work, and was puzzled, read it, and then they assented, too.) She is that kind of good.

Though hardly a happy poet in the usual sense—born in Krakow in 1923, possibly the worst moment and place ever to arrive on this planet, with Hitler waiting to greet her on her sixteenth birthday and Stalin evilly coming along behind, how could she be?—Szymborska’s poetry had the gift of creating both the happiness of wisdom felt and the ecstatic happiness of the particulars of life fully imagined. From the experience of armies and dogmas and death that shaped her early life, she found a new commitment to the belief that the poetic impulse, however small its objects, is always saner than the polemical imperative, however passionate its certitudes.

Szymborska took as subjects “chairs and sorrows, scissors, tenderness, transistors, violins, teacups, dams and quips,” to use a list from the title poem in that last collection. Though determinedly microcosmic, she was never minor. Szymborska takes on an onion, and that onion is peeled, down to its essence. A Szymborska poem is always charming, wonderfully charming, charming as a small child singing, charming as a great pop-song lyric. But her poems are also, to use an old word, “deep,” mysteriously so, about the very nature of existence. The sum effect of a Szymborska poem, at least as rendered in American English, is often of an odd but happy collaboration between Ogden Nash and Emily Dickinson. (Though she is less easily defeated than Ogden, and more worldly than Emily.)

In her poetry, a child about to pull a tablecloth from a table becomes every scientist beginning an experiment; a visit to the doctor, with its stripping down and piling on of clothes, a metaphor for the company and odd mechanisms of our naked bodies; she ponders the grammar of divorce (“are they still linked with the conjunction ‘and’ or does a period divide them?”) and the inner life of Hitler’s dog. In my favorite of all her poems, “A Tale Began” (which I was overjoyed to be able to use for the epigraph for my own book “Through The Children’s Gate”), she writes about the range of human difficulties that, over time, make the decision to have a child impossible. “The world is never ready for the birth of a child,” she writes, and goes on:

Our ships are not yet back from Winland

We still have to get over the S. Gothard pass

We’ve got to outwit the watchmen on the desert of Thor

Fight our way through the sewers to Warsaw’s center…

But the child, arrives anyway, and she wishes that:

May delivery be easy,

may our child grow and be well.

Let him be happy from time to time

and leap over abysses.

Let his heart have strength to endure

and his mind be awake and reach far. But not so far

that it sees into the future.

Spare him

that one gift,

O heavenly powers

In a way, Szymborska supplied her own best epitaph, and obituary, in the text of her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which she took on the “astonishment” of normal life:

“Astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events.” …But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

Not a single existence unastonishing. So perhaps a notice merging her existence into so many others, not making too much of it, would have been the one she wanted, and found truly astonishing. In any case, the poems are there this morning as much as they were there last night, with the poet still smoking and smiling on the cover of her final book. Though doubtless to those who loved her as Wislawa the loss is immense, is it too terrible to admit that I can’t recall a literary loss I’ve felt with more emotion but less grief? We can now press Szymborska on to the next receptive reader. “You now have a curated body of work that you can love and contemplate,” that same wife said this morning. While the poet lived, it was cheering to think, as her readers did almost every day, that another poem might be coming. Now that’s she gone, we’re happy—truly happy, astonishingly happy—to know the poems came.

Photograph by Alberto Cristofari/A3/Contrasto/Redux.