Customer Reviews

Provinces

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I first encountered Milosz when a poem of his was printed in Harper's about eight years ago. Stunning stuff, so I've always kept an eye out for his works. About two months ago, I was on a silent retreat in the Berkshires, and a copy of this volume was on the library shelf. A great companion for days of autumn silence and solitude. Milosz considers the big subjects, the essential questions. So it was perfect food for my contemplative brain. At a time when I am steadily losing interest in modern free verse poetry that reads more like dull and fragmentary journalism than anything really beautiful, Milosz in this collection reminds me that the form is not dead but vibrantly alive (though the poet himself is no longer with us.) Great book - highly recommended.

PROVINCES finds Polish Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz confronting the quandaries of old age. Milosz has always been a philosophical poet, and he is so in these poems--but often here his philosophizing turns to the topic of philosophy's failures. In poems such as "Conversation with Jeanne" and "December 1," he tells us that the philosophical and theological arguments that impressed him when he was younger do so no longer. Indeed, several poems, such as "Blacksmith Shop" and "In Common," abandon abstract contemplation in favor of celebrating the physical world. This concern with things for their own sake is also embodied in his poem "Linnaeus," which offers a tribute to the inventor of modern taxonomy.

As W.B. Yeats does in his late poems, Milosz writes from the perspective of being a widely admired poet grown old. These poems dramatize his internal conflicts, including his doubts about his life's work: he refers to himself in the first, second, and third persons, and some poems openly take the form of internal conversations. These are powerful poems of old age, as often self-ironizing as self-elegizing.

Reading translated poetry can be a matter of making allowances, but that's not the case here: Milosz's collaboration with translator Robert Hass results in memorable English renderings of the Polish originals.