Selected Poems: 1931-2004 [Hardcover]

Czeslaw Milosz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 4, 2006

Selected Poems: 1931-2004

celebrates Czeslaw Milosz's lifetime of poetry. Widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of our time, Milosz is a master of expression and probing inquiry. Life opened for Czeslaw Milosz at a crossroads of civilizations in northeastern Europe. This was less a melting pot than a torrent of languages and ideas, where old folk traditions met Catholic, Protestant, Judaic, and Orthodox rites. What unfolded next around him was a century of catastrophe and madness: two world wars, revolutions, invasions, and the murder of tens of millions, all set to a cacophony of hymns, gunfire, national anthems, and dazzling lies. In the thick of this upheaval, wide awake and in awe of living, dodging shrapnel, imprisonment, and despair, Milosz tried to understand both history and the moment, with humble respect for the suffering of each individual. He read voraciously in many languages and wrote masterful poetry that, even in translation, is infused with a tireless spirit and a penetrating insight into fundamental human dilemmas and the staggering yet simple truth that "to exist on the earth is beyond any power to name." Unflinching, outspoken, timeless, and unsentimental, Milosz digs through the rubble of the past, forging a vision -- and a warning -- that encompasses both pain and joy. "His intellectual life," writes Seamus Heaney, "could be viewed as a long single combat with shape-shifting untruth."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Lithuanian-born Milosz (1911– 2004) became a leader among Polish-language modernists in the 1930s, then witnessed the Nazi destruction of Warsaw. His epochal early poetry described the horrors of war and the enduring power of joy: "I have seen the fall of States and the perdition of tribes," one 1943 poem says. "Love means to look at yourself/ The way one looks at distant things," advises his much-loved sequence from the same year, "The World." The postwar Milosz became a Polish diplomat, then rejected Soviet communism and sought political asylum; he taught at Berkeley till the end of the Cold War and returned to Poland in his last years. In decades of pellucid verse (and lyrical prose, also included), Milosz viewed at once the beauty of single moments and the sweep of civilization and barbarism over centuries: a stubborn defender of human decency and of liberal hopes, he saw, as few have, how "what could not be taken away,/ is taken. People, countrysides./ And the heart does not die when one thinks it should." Translated by many hands, but principally by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass, the verse carries over into English not only its sentiments, but much of its music, too: this first posthumous selection (New & Collected Poems appeared in 2001) should renew national attention to a poet of international significance. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

A major voice of the twentieth-century West, the late Nobel laureate may have written in Polish and resided in America, but he was a Lithuanian patriot all along. Many poems are datelined "Warsaw," "Paris," and "Berkeley," but the first four are from Wilno. The Lithuanian capital, heinously decimated of its Jews by the Nazis and its native gentiles by Stalin, and even more the countryside of Milosz's childhood, are the poems' recurrent settings; generations of family members are the persons featured in them. A modernist, Milosz eschews formal verse, metaphor, and lyric effusion. One of his masters seems to be Whitman; he often uses a long, projective line and assumes a kind of dialogue with himself as the representative of his people; but he lacks Whitman's vaunting and mysticism, however, and prefers single-sentence lines to run-ons and enjambment. He can be a chore to read in the long sequences in verse and documentary prose of his middle period. His earlier poems are prophetically sharp and pungent; the latest ones are gently, sadly, warily wise. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; First Edition edition (April 4, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060188677
• ISBN-13: 978-0060188672
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #534,437 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Calling Us Back to Ourselves, June 29, 2006

By 

John Michael Albert "John-Michael Albert" (Portsmouth NH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Selected Poems: 1931-2004 (Hardcover)

What I love most about reading modern poetry is the open friendliness of the poets. I usually have two or three books in the works and picking them up and reading them is like sitting down with the poets in my kitchen and having a wide ranging conversation with a really smart friend over coffee. Not Milosz. Reading Milosz is like enjoying an evening in someone's formal living room, silent as an invited guest should be. It is a privilege to read these poems. Here is a contemporary who lived through it all and was not ground to dust. Here is a survivor who grew suspicious of all -- ALL -- easy solutions and was absolutely confident that, whatever The World threw at him -- and by extension, at us -- he could wrap his mind around it. Seamus Heaney's introduction says Milosz was "tender toward innocence, tough-minded when faced with brutality and injustice." In the end, he retained his awe of the natural world and his believe in the holiness of everyday things. In short, when Milosz sees us being distracted by the insistence of externals, people and things that feast on our enegy leaving us with nothing, he calls us back to ourselves, the point from which everything is adorned with meaning for each of us, the context in which even the most horrible is endurable.