DURING the Frankfurt Book Fair in October it was announced that the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Polish representatives at the fair were taken completely by surprise, and visitors inquiring about the writer had to be content with a few hastily thrown together details and a badly-reproduced photograph.

The low-key response seemed particularly appropriate for a poet who has always avoided the limelight. Born in western Poland in 1923, Szymborska has spent most of her life in Krakow, making a living by working for literary journals. Her first volume of poetry was in the Socialist Realist mode, and contains the usual panegyrics to communism, but she soon renounced ideological writing in favour of a more individual style. The publication of the volume Calling to the Yeti (1957) established her as one of the leading poets of the post-war generation, and although her output is not large, she has continued to figure in Polish literary life ever since.

Her war-time experiences made Szymborska especially sensitive to the dilemma of human beings caught up in the tangle of history. She explores this problem not by a direct confrontation with contemporary events, but by seeking analogies in the past, particularly the world of ancient Greece and Rome. This has invited comparisons with Zbigniew Herbert, who also uses history to illustrate the recurring nature of totalitarianism and the necessity of moral choice. Unlike Herbert, however, Szymborska does not condemn her fellow men, but rather stresses the haphazardness and incomprehensibility of the reality with which they are faced. The tone of her poetry is distant and ironic, but never strident, even when the subject is war:

"After every war/ somebody has to tidy up ... Somebody has to clear the road of rubble so that the carts full of corpses can pass by". (The End and The Beginning).

But time does not just bring destruction, it also heals, and the poem ends on a note of optimism:

"In the grass, which has overgrown/ causes and consequences/ somebody has to lie/ with a stalk between his teeth/ and stare at the clouds."

Szymborska is also very much concerned with the undramatic events of everyday life. Much of her poetry is a questioning of accepted concepts; even love must be subjected to her interrogation:

"Happy love. Is it necessary?/ Wonderful children are born without it." (Happy Love).

The dominant tone is one of doubt, but a positive doubt, one that never succumbs to despair:

"Poetry - / but what exactly is poetry?/ More than one shaky answer/ has been given to that question./ And I don't know, I don't know and I cling to that/

like a handle of salvation." (Some People Like Poetry).

Szymborska has a small but dedicated following in Poland, and to a lesser extent abroad (many poems have been translated into English and German), but other Polish writers such as Czeslaw Milosz or the dramatist Slawomir Mrozek are better known. This is partly due to her dislike of publicity: she gave only one interview after winning the Nobel Prize. But perhaps it is even more due to the elusive nature of her writings, a quality she acknowledges herself in the poem Epitaph:

"Classical as a comma, she lies at ease, The author of a book of verse.

The earth has deigned to grant her peace, Though her corpse belonged to no literary set."