Customer Reviews

New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001

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This collection of poetry is pure transcendence. I was amazed with the quality of these poems--how they were selected and arranged--as well as the translations (Hass). Were these poems actually written in a language other than English? It does not seem so here. I couldn't imagine even the slightest nuance or reverberation of langauge lost in this work.

I highly recommend this volume. It seems more logical than previous Milosz collections, and the poems here make it clear that his Nobel Prize in Literature was well-deserved. Milosz is a prophet and soothsayer of the modern era. And with this collection, despite its price, each poem is economically precise and wise; there is no monetary value that could estimate the value of this superb collection.

The most interesting aspect of this volume is recognizing familiar Milosz poems juxtaposed with his latest work (2000). His latest work has the depth of lived experience and a maturity of patient observation of the human condition. Its strength lies in its approach to elemental themes: growing older, mortality, the trials of love and war, the purity of faith's optimism.

This book is a "must have."

After September 11th, I, a formerly avid reader, could no longer read anything but news, dreadful news. A lifelong subscriber to the New Yorker, I picked up an issue which magically opened to a poem by Milosz. I think it was the first or second issue that followed the bombings.

The poem provided one of those rare moments where one feels transformed by words, where life is worth living again because someone said something so beautifully that it was again worth it to continue on.

I don't even know if Milosz wrote that poem specifically in response to what happened on September 11th; surely he saw greater horrors in Poland than we can even imagine. Yet ever since, his words have granted me peace, not only from the fear of annihilation through disaster, but from the ultimate annihilation of death.

I also love that he's still writing at ninety. I love how, against all odds, he decided to fall the way of faith.

I read one of his poems each night, like a prayer, like a song.

Milosz's poetry has a kind of energy that makes you want to shout on a rooftop: read this book. Any poet of any stature writes poems that fail to rise to the level of masterpieces, but in this book of 750 pages they are few and far between. The translator deserves much credit for these poem read as if they were originally written in English.
I used to think that Paul Celan captured the horror of war torn Europe the best, but Milosz now wins the title. The first books of this collection are harrowing and wistful.
The books written from California and France take a more metaphysical tone but never fail to be touching and humane.
The most recent poems detailing growing old are often funny but always reminiscent of just how much he has paid for growing up during wartime.
Shakespeare and Milosz had their fingers on the pulse of the human condition and have created poems that will truly last forever.
I recommend this book even to people who do not normally read poetry. It has changed me--- for the better.

Few poets have as eloquently and profoundly mapped out the manic contours of the twentieth century as have Czeslaw Milosz. And even fewer poets have truly lived through what they wrote. In both categories, Milosz stands as a towering giant, a massive oak which has weathered the most savage of storms and the sweetest of sunshines. Anyone interested in walking along the trial and tribulation-filled path of the last century would be wise to pick up this ultimate testament to Milosz's life and work.

This tome covers the entire expanse of Milosz's writing career, from his early years in Lithuania, where he followed the Frnech symbolists in writing image-dense lyrics, to his twilight years in Berkeley and Krakow, where his majestic voice evolved into that of a prophet's. Each poem exudes the light and darkness of the various stations along his life. Young student in Vilnius, journalist in pre-war Warsaw, the contemplative and distanced survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, the awe-struck immigrant never quite at home in his new land. All of these stops are painted with a wry and mediatative hand. Milosz's work is that of the thinker. His mind soars above the peaks and abysses of his life, well-distanced from the churning seas of emotion. He never delves into the passion of the moment, into the realm of the subjective. Milosz spent his childhood years wanting to be a naturalist and his objective, scientist-like perspective dominates throughout his work. In the Miloszian world, we are all parts of a much greater whole, our individual tears and spurts of temporary joy matter little in the grand picture of things. And it is this global picture that Milosz attempts to put down on the canvas. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the physical world is Milosz's favorite backdrop, and even when it appears absent, it's scent is still traceable. His formative years spent in the wilds of Lithuania gave him a fatalistic faith in the indestructible permanence of things, that no doubt helped him endure the hell of WW II Poland.

While detachement is Milosz's telltale signature, our human presence in the machine of history is really what these poems attempt to divulge. Like his country, Milosz experienced firsthand two totalitarian beasts, that of Nazi Germany and of Soviet Russia. Yet, Milosz's credo is not one of naive heroism, as is much in Polish poetry. His message is far more universal with its 'human, all too human' colors. For him, the true heros were those who managed to survive, to exist and to stubbornly hold on to some semblance of human dignity whilst all around bestiality reigned. The boy on the barricades of Warsaw who died nameless and faceless, this is the best we can do. Milosz avoids pointing the finger at the big beasts themselves, but instead asks us to examine our hearts. 'Did you really need to plunge into an abyss, To compose systems rather than settling into the fairy tale.'

Milosz's later poems carry the weight of a life lived through extraordinary circumstances. A life neither excessively noble nor excessively evil. Milosz's writes of and for the survivor, for most of us, who reach life's end with a complex mesh of guilt and content. 'I feel relief thinking I was no better and no worse than many, and that together with them I wait for forgiveness.' Like Shakespeare before him, Milosz's lasting message is one of humility before our sad condition, before our sad history, and most of all, before our merciful Maker. The hardest of lessons, but also the most important.

It is difficult often to take to heart a poet in translation. It is difficult too for the modern reader to focus on a Poet who does not dwell in his own subjective consciousness, and does not have 'I' at the heart of his world of perception. For these reasons it took me time to 'get into' these poems but once I did I felt in the presence of a specially wonderful world of poetry, an especially rich and observant sensibility. The 'wake- up' poem for me was one of Milosz's most famous, 'Campo dei Fiori'. In this poem Milosz compares the square in Florence in which Giordano Bruno was burned with the square in Warsaw close to the burning Warsaw Ghetto. He richly details the life which goes on all around in the two squares, and the indifference of all to the great suffering.
"Someone will read as moral
that the people of Rome or Warsaw
haggle, laugh, make love
as they pass by martyrs' pyres.
Someone else will read
of the passing of things human,
of the oblivion
born before the flames have died."
In this same collection Milosz has a set of three small remarkable poems one on Hope, one on Faith, and one on Love.
"Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it from various ills-
A bird and a tree say to him. Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things,
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves.
Who serves best doesn't always understand.'

Milosz wrote poetry for seventy years, and his poems line by line do not cease to surprise. He shows an astonishing combination of intellect and feeling. His poems are rich with observations of the external world. Naming the things and the phenomena of the world seem in one way at the heart of his vision.
But it should not be forgotten that his poetry has a strong political and historical dimension. He was one who sympathized deeply with the victims of the Nazis, who fought against Communist oppression. His poems show a feeling for an understanding of freedom. They are also rich in religious feeling though this comes mediated by irony and questioning.
Milosz is too a Poet deeply in touch with the earth, who sees it in detail and from afar at once. In his Nobel Speech he quotes the writer Selma Lagerlof who said that the way of the Poet is to at once fly above reality and at the same time be down close observing it. This double - perception of seeing from afar and seeing from close- up pervades all those long- lined multi- stanzad poems so remote from what has been much poetry in our time.
Milosz's work is full of surprise and irony, and can suddenly wake the reader to a sense of revelation in delight.
I have not even in this review begun to hint at the riches of this incredibly wonderful book of poems - poems of a great poet indeed.

Milosz came highly recommended: by Anna Akhmatova, Irina Ratushinskaya and Joseph Brodsky! (I even think that I read that Pasternak was a fan late in life!)

The cover blurb says that he contains the twentieth century within himself like no other poet, and this certainly is true. But this is not primarily "historical" poetry. It covers deep issues, but remains intensely honest, open, personal, experiential and biblically spiritual. Having said all of that, I don't do Milosz's poetry justice. It is not there for anybody's encyclopedic curiosity of "honest Christian experience". It is a scalpel that cuts open his own heart, and mine. Repeatedly. Clearly. Without descending into the self-consciously avant-garde. He opens me in more ways than I sometimes think I want to be opened.

In the very last poem of this, the greatest collection of Milosz's works, he so lucidly begins.......

Late Ripeness by Czeslaw Milosz

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.........

******************

This wonderful collection spans a lush and lavish 70 long years; years magically molded in the hands of a cunning and capable and wise prophet of our times.
Milosz yearns for a 'tangible reality' to maintain the health of poetry. He is accessible even to the untrained ear.....for it is ultimately in the lack of illusion that his work shines and reverberates.

In his introduction, he concludes that "poetry has always been for me a participation in the humanly modulated time of my contemporaries."

And we see this simple humility reflected in the last verses of his final poem of this collection.
*************************

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago -
a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel
staving its hull against a reef - they dwell in us,
waiting for a fulfillment.

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.

**************************************

This rich collection will transport you back and forth in time with a gifted, yet humble master of distillation, distance and destiny!

Particularly interesting in this volume, and not I think available in any of the individual volumes alone, is the whole experience of his 70 years struggling with the demons of war and Communism and his own survivor's guilt. Many people have written about such things, many good and enlightening things have been said. But here is a man who struggled for seventy years, whose attitudes and balances evolved, who can comment not only on the experience, but the experience seen from perspectives of ten and twenty and forty and seventy years--and can comment on his own perspectives with an additional insight. You can, and should, read this volume like a novel, cover to cover, straight through, and watch him as he finds his accommodations, and as they crumble and are remade.

Milosz's poetry is at once beautiful and haunting. While this may sound like a generic statement, this is not a generic poet. Milosz's poetry is diverse, including everything from politics to personality, internal struggle, and the question of "true poetry," to religion and coming to terms with our own philosophies. His poetry covers the full spectrum, from dreary cityscapes collapsed to ruin, to beautiful lines of nature. This poetry collection is translated superbly; if one didn't know Milosz was Polish, one would think these poems were English originals. Part of the reason for this is that Milosz himself had a hand in translating them; he spent the latter part of his life as a professor at Berkeley.

I highly recommend this collection. It will grace my bookself until the end of my years, when the pages are old and yellowed. There's no letting go of poetry this rich and masterful. Milosz is a poet for the ages.

I purchased this book to use in a workshop on the poet, and found it to be an excellent resource. Almost his whole collection of poetry and prose is in a single volume.