The Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska has died at 88.

She died of lung cancer and abundance of years on 1 March. She was a reclusive writer. It was regarded as an act of justice when she received the Nobel Prize in 1996, in the wake of Czeslaw Milosz and three other Polish-born writers. Milosz liked but rather condescended to her. She was not a prolific poet, but her work is intense and marked by a rigorous integrity of purpose.

The prize more or less extinguished her production for years. Her translator Clare Cavanagh said, 'Her friends called it the "Nobel tragedy".’ She spent most of her creative time living quietly and modestly in Krakow where she worked as an editor.

'At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity,' she told Ed Hirsch. 'I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn’t possible to save mankind.' Her poetry was personal, she insisted, about people, about life as it is lived and not as it is imagined. Her version of Mrs Lot does not make light, or politics, of this woman's retrospection:

I looked back mourning my silver bowl.

Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap.

So I wouldn’t have to keep staring at the righteous nape

Of my husband Lot’s neck.

From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead

He wouldn’t so much as hesitate.

From the disobedience of the meek.

Checking for pursuers.

Struck by the silence, hoping God had changed his mind.

(New York Times)