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Virtual Macedonia Bookstore - New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001
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List Price: $45.00
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Manufacturer: Ecco
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 891.85173
EAN: 9780060196677
ISBN: 006019667X
Label: Ecco
Manufacturer: Ecco
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 800
Publication Date: 2001-10-01
Publisher: Ecco
Release Date: 2001-10-02
Studio: Ecco
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Perfect
Comment: It's amazing how beautifully Milosz's poetry translates into English. For those of us who are in love with poetry of nature, history, and love itself, this is the perfect addition to any library.
Customer Rating:
Summary: To see from soaring above and down to the last detail A great Poet describes the world
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I can't bring myself to put it on the shelf
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Spanning Seven Decades with a Humble Muse......
Comment:
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.
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This rich collection will transport you back and forth in time with a gifted, yet humble master of distillation, distance and destiny!
Customer Rating:
Summary: From the master's hand
Comment: 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.
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Editorial Reviews:
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New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 celebrates the exceptional career of Czeslaw Milosz, from his first work, written when he was twenty, to his newest poems, published for the first time in English in this volume.Widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of our time, Czeslaw Milosz is a master of probing inquiry and graceful expression. From his early poems, in which he declares, "I, a faithful son of the black earth, shall return to the black earth" ("Hymn"), to his newest work, in which he sees himself as a lofty, gray-headed spirit "Saved by his amazement, eternal and divine" ("For My Eighty-eighth Birthday"), Milosz's poetry is infused with a tireless spirit and penetrating insight into fundamental human dilemmas. In "Report," he arrives at the staggering yet simple truth that "to exist on the earth is beyond any power to name." in "Craftsman," he looks back over a life that was difficult to lead, but in the end he is nonetheless "Praising, renewing, healing. Grateful because the sun rose for you and will rise for others.""With its clarity, historical awareness and moral vision," writes Don Began in The Nation, Milosz's work proves that "poetry can define and address the concerns of an age." Milosz himself describes poetry as "the passionate pursuit of the Real," "a witness and participant in one of mankind's major transformations." A defector to France in 1951 after having lived under Communism and National Socialism in Eastern Europe, he brings to bear the political awareness of an exile -- most notably in A Treatise on Poetry, a sixty-page exploration of the world wars that rocked the first half of the twentieth century. His newer poems, such as "Sarajevo," "Zdziechowski," and "On the Inequality of Men," also reflect the sharp political focus through which he continues to bear witness to the events that stir the world.Unflinching, outspoken, and unsentimental, Milosz digs among the rubble of the past, choosing from the bad as well as the good, forging a vision that encompasses pain as well as joy. His work is "one of the monumental splendors of poetry in our age" (Edward Hirsch, The New York Times Book Review). New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 is an essential collection from one of the most important voices in contemporary poetry.
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