In the final chapters, Des Barres, who likely helped inspire Kate Hudson’s Penny Lane in Almost Famous, sounds bemused as she concludes that love (or was it just LSD?) shared with the likes of Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger, and Don Johnson could never last in an era of unhindered promiscuity. As far as chronicling the heady ’60s and ’70s goes, Des Barres is no Didion, but she has an excellent sense of humor, a vivid memory, and a predilection for skin- and soul-baring honesty about her backstage conquests. Pamela Des Barres’s breathlessly lewd memoir of her years as a groupie should come with a cover-up when taken to the beach. Reading Here, I feel as if I’m momentarily escaping from the world, even though I know that, through Szymborska’s eyes, I’m seeing it more clearly. In one poem, Nature has grown tired of creating new faces for people and has started reusing old ones: “Those passersby might be Archimedes in jeans, / Catherine the Great draped in resale.” Elsewhere, she explores the human capacity for mythmaking, as in a poem about a woman in denial about her husband’s death even after seeing his body: “The watch is just a regular old watch, / And our names on that ring, / they’re only the most ordinary names.” Her words alternately unsettle, delight, and soothe. Throughout Here, a luminous collection of 27 poems, Szymborska indulges in fanciful thought experiments and imagines surreal conversations (with her younger self, with an idea, with her own memory). Her poetry can make all of human history seem like a daydream, or a cloud of dust seem like the cosmos.
Reading Wisława Szymborska is like peering through a lens and being unable to tell whether it’s a telescope’s or a microscope’s. IF YOU WANT TO FEEL WONDER ABOUT THE UNIVERSE