A new collection of work from Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz that includes previously untranslated poems written during his time in Washington, D.C., and his years in Europe before and after

One of the most revered poets of the twentieth century, Czeslaw Milosz famously bore witness to its violence in his native Poland and in the war's aftermath from exile in Europe and the United States. Immediately after the war, he lived in Washington, D.C., working as a diplomatic official, having left behind an old world stained by bloodshed and still in the throes of ideological conflict as he sought to find his bearings in a new world.

Poet in the New World gathers the poems written during these years--for the first time in English translation--and is contextualized by the poetry that came directly before and after, from poems written in Warsaw in 1945, shortly before he departed for the United States, to others written in Europe from 1951 to 1953, after his significant time away. Capturing Milosz at his existential and stylistic best, Poet in the New World is attuned to the necessity of imagination and the duty of language and is filled with wonder and skepticism. Milosz grapples with the extraordinary violence he had witnessed in Warsaw and the strange postwar United States he has inhabited, all while pondering the enduring fate of his beloved Poland. In the poem Warsaw, the poet asks, How can I live in this country/Where the foot knocks against/the unburied bones of kin?

Equal parts affecting and illuminating, Poet in the New World is an essential addition to the Milosz canon, in a beautifully rendered translation by Robert Hass and David Frick, that reverberates with the questions of histories past, present, and future.

One of the century's most important poets.
--San Francisco Chronicle

One of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest.
--Joseph Brodsky

Nobody tells the story of this age better than Czeslaw Milosz.
--New Republic

Commemorating the centenary year of Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, Selected and Last Poems 1934 - 2004 is a sterling collection of some of the finest works of one the most revered poets of our time--including more than forty later poems new to this edition and never before published in English. Selected and Last Poems is a perfect introduction for poetry readers who might still be unfamiliar with this literary giant's monumental body of work.

New and Collected Poems: 1931--2001 celebrates seven decades of Czeslaw Milosz's exceptional career. Widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of our time, Milosz is a master of probing inquiry and graceful expression. His poetry is infused with a tireless spirit and penetrating insight into fundamental human dilemmas and the staggering yet simple truth that to exist on the earth is beyond any power to name.

Czeslaw Milosz worked with the Polish Resistance movement in Warsaw during World War II and defected to France in 1951. His work brings to bear the political awareness of an exile--most notably in A Treatise on Poetry, a forty-page exploration of the world wars that rocked the first half of the twentieth century. His later poems also reflect the sharp political focus through which this Nobel Laureate never fails to bear witness to the events that stir the world.

Digging among the rubble of the past, Milosz forges a vision that encompasses pain as well as joy. His work, wrote Edward Hirsch in the New York Times Book Review, is one of the monumental splendors of poetry in our age. With more than fifty poems from the end of Milosz's career, this is an essential collection from one of the most important voices in contemporary poetry.

Czeslaw Milosz did not believe he would ever return to the river valley in which he grew up. But in the spring of 1989, exactly fifty years after he left, the new government of independent Lithuania welcomed him back to that magical region of his childhood. Many of the poems in Facing the River record his experiences there, where the river of the Issa Valley symbolizes the river of time as well as the river of mythology, over which one cannot step twice. This is the river Milosz faces while exploring ancient themes. He reflects upon the nature of imagination, human experience, good and evil--and celebrates the wonders of life on earth.

In these later poems, the poems of older age, this Nobel laureate takes a long look back at the catastrophic upheavals of the twentieth century; yet despite the soberness of his themes, he writes with the lightness of touch found only in the great masters.

Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz's most recent collection Second Space marks a new stage in one of the great poetic pilgrimages of our time. Few poets have inhabited the land of old age as long or energetically as Milosz, for whom this territory holds both openings and closings, affirmations as well as losses. 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, he writes in Late Ripeness. Elsewhere he laments the loss of his voracious vision -- My wondrously quick eyes, you saw many things, / Lands and cities, islands and oceans -- only to discover a new light that defies the limits of physical sight: Without eyes, my gaze is fixed on one bright point, / That grows large and takes me in.

Second Space is typically capacious in the range of voices, forms, and subjects it embraces. It moves seamlessly from dramatic monologues to theological treatises, from philosophy and history to epigrams, elegies, and metaphysical meditations. It is unified by Milosz's ongoing quest to find the bond linking the things of this world with the order of a second space, shaped not by necessity, but grace. Second Space invites us to accompany a self-proclaimed apprentice on this extraordinary quest. In Treatise on Theology, Milosz calls himself a one day's master. He is, of course, far more than this. Second Space reveals an artist peerless both in his capacity to confront the world's suffering and in his eagerness to embrace its joys: Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds. / Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice! / How will I live without you, my consoling one! / But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees, / And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth.

Thomas, the child-protagonist of The Issa Valley, is subject to both the contradictions of nature in this severe northern setting and sometimes enchanting, sometimes brutal timbre of village life. There are the deep pine and spruce forests, the grouse and the deer, and the hunter's gun. There is Magdalena, the beautiful mistress of the village priest, whose suicide unleashes her ghost to haunt the parish. There are also the loving grandparents with whom Thomas lives, who provide a balance of the not-quite-Dostoevskian devils that visit the villagers. In the end, Thomas is severed from his childhood and the Issa River, and leaves prepared for adventures beyond his valley. Poetic and richly imagined, The Issa Valley is a masterful work of fiction from one of our greatest living poets.

I went on a journey in order to acquaint myself with my province, in a two-horse wagon with a lot of fodder and a tin bucket rattling in the back. The bucket was required for the horses to drink from. I traveled through a country of hills and pine groves that gave way to woodlands, where swirls of smoke hovered over the roofs of houses, as if they were on fire, for they were chimneyless cabins; I crossed districts of fields and lakes. It was so interesting to be moving, to give the horses their rein, and wait until, in the next valley, a village slowly appeared, or a park with the white spot of a manor in it. And always we were barked at by a dog, assiduous in its duty. That was the beginning of the century; this is its . I have been thinking not only of the people who lived there once but also of the generations of dogs accompanying them in their everyday bustle, and one night-I don't know where it came from-in a pre-dawn sleep, that funny and tender phrase composed itself: a road-side dog. --Road-Side Dog

The autobiography of the Nobel laureate

Before he emigrated to the United States, Czeslaw Milosz lived through many of the social upheavals that defined the first half of the twentieth century. Here, in this compelling account of his early life, the author sketches his moral and intellectual history from childhood to the early fifties, providing the reader with a glimpse into a way of life that was radically different from anything an American or even a Western European could know.

Using the events of his life as a starting point, Native Realm sets out to explore the consciousness of a writer and a man, examining the possibility of finding glimmers of meaning in the midst of chaos while remaining true to oneself.

In this beautifully written and elegantly translated work, Milosz is at his very best.

A comprehensive selection of essays--some never before translated into English--by the Nobel Laureate.

To Begin Where I Am brings together a rich sampling of poet Czeslaw Milosz's prose writings. Spanning more than a half century, from an impassioned essay on human nature, wartime atrocities, and their challenge to ethical beliefs, written in 1942 in the form of a letter to his friend Jerzy Andrzejewski, to brief biographical sketches and poetic prose pieces from the late 1990s, this volume presents Milosz the prose writer in all his multiple, beguiling guises. The incisive, sardonic analyst of the seductive power of communism is also the author of tender, elegiac portraits of friends famous and obscure; the witty commentator on Polish complexes writes lyrically of the California landscape. Two great themes predominate in these essays, several of which have never appeared before in English: Milosz's personal struggle to sustain his religious faith, and his unswerving allegiance to a poetry that is on the side of man.

Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, reflects upon poetry's testimony to the events of our tumultuous time. From the special perspectives of my corner of Europe, a classical and Catholic education, a serious encounter with Marxism, and a life marked by journeys and exiles, Milosz has developed a sensibility at once warm and detached, flooded with specific memory yet never hermetic or provincial.

Milosz addresses many of the major problems of contemporary poetry, beginning with the pessimism and negativism prompted by reductionist interpretations of man's animal origins. He examines the tendency of poets since Mallarm to isolate themselves from society, and stresses the need for the poet to make himself part of the great human family. One chapter is devoted to the tension between classicism and realism; Milosz believes poetry should be a passionate pursuit of the real. In Ruins and Poetry he looks at poems constructed from the wreckage of a civilization, specifically that of Poland after the horrors of World War II. Finally, he expresses optimism for the world, based on a hoped-for better understanding of the lessons of modern science, on the emerging recognition of humanity's oneness, and on mankind's growing awareness of its own history.

Interrelated essays by the Nobel Laureate on his adopted home of California, which Lewis Hyde, writing in The Nation, called remarkable, morally serious and thought-provoking essays, which strive to lay aside the barren categories by which we have understood and judged our state . . . Their subject is the frailty of modern civilization.

Legends of Modernity, now available in English for the first time, brings together some of Czeslaw Milosz's early essays and letters, composed in German-occupied Warsaw during the winter of 1942-43.

Why did the European spirit succumb to such a devastating fiasco? the young Milosz asks. Half a century later, when Legends of Modernity saw its first publication in Poland, Milosz said: If everything inside you is agitation, hatred, and despair, write measured, perfectly calm sentences... While the essays here reflect a perfect calm, the accompanying contemporaneous exchange of letters between Milosz and Jerzy Andrzejewski express the raw emotions of agitation, hatred and despair experienced by these two close friends struggling to understand the proximate causes of this debacle of western civilization, and the relevance, if any, of the teachings of the Catholic church.

Passionate, poignant, and compelling, Legends of Modernity is a deeply moving insight into the mind and emotions of one of the greatest writers of our time.

Polish Wilno--now Vilnius, in Lithuania--was the city of Czeslaw Milosz's youth and adolescence. In this collection of essays and reminiscences, written over a span of three decades, the Nobel Prize-winning poet traces an informal autobiography against the street map of an extraordinary city--a crossroads of languages, cultures, and beliefs--that lies at the very heart of his internal geography.

Beginning with My Streets, available for the first time in paperback, gathers portraits of the writers Aleksander Wat, Dwight MacDonald, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, as well as the great Swedish scientist Emanuel Swedenborg; an exchange of letters from the 1950s with the novelist and diarist Witold Gombrowicz; and a selection of speeches delivered between 1967 and 1987, including Milosz's Nobel Lecture. These diffuse reckonings, distinguished throughout by the flavor of personality and the aura of place, have a cumulative power--they are quintessential Milosz.

Memories, dreams and reflections from the Nobel Laureate

The ABC book is a polish genre-a loose form related to a hypertext novel-composed of short, alphabetically arranged entries. In Milosz's conception, the ABC book becomes a sort of autobiographical reference book, combining entries concerning characters from his earlier work with references to some of his memory poems. He also writes of real, historical figures like Camus who were particularly influential during his formative years, and of broader topics such as The City, Unhappiness, and Money. Another fascinating entry in Milosz's bold opus, Milosz's ABCs is an engaging tribute to a brilliant mind.