The Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz began his remarkable A Treatise on Poetry in the winter of 1955 and finished it in the spring of 1956. It was published originally in parts in the Polish émigré journal Kultura. Now it is available in English for the first time in this expert translation by the award-winning American poet Robert Hass.
A Treatise on Poetry is a great poem about some of the most terrible events in the twentieth century. Divided into four sections, the poem begins at the end of the nineteenth century as a comedy of manners and moves with a devastating momentum through World War I to the horror of World War II. Then it takes on directly and plainly the philosophical abyss into which the European cultures plunged."Author's Notes" on the poem appear at the end of the volume. A stunning literary composition, these notes stand alone as brilliant miniature portraits that magically re-create the lost world of prewar Europe.A Treatise on Poetry evokes the European twentieth century, its comedy and terror and grief, with the force and expressiveness of a great novel. A tone poem to a lost time, a harrowing requiem for the century's dead, and a sober meditation on history, consciousness, and art: here is a masterwork that confronts the meaning of the twentieth century with a directness and vividness that are without parallel.

A Treatise on Poetry

Literature & Fiction

Czesław Miłosz

Poetry

The Ecco Press

Second Space: New Poems

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."

Ecco

The Captive Mind

Politics & Social Sciences

Sociology

Penguin Books, Ltd.

The Captive Mind (King Penguin)

Politics & Government

Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. Native Realm; A Search for Self Definition, paperback, Clean tight sound square in portrait pictorial papberback, no reading creases, apperars unopened and unread.

Native Realm: A Search for Self Realism

King Penguin

An issue of Granta devoted to all things Soviet, including fiction, non-fiction, photographs, interviews and an exclusive interview with Mikhail Gorbachev by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Granta 30, Winter 1990: New Europe

GRAHAM SWIFT

Ivan Klíma

Joseph Brodsky

Classics

Granta USA

[Translated by Jane Zielonko][Read by Stefan Rudnicki]The best-known prose work by the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature.Written in the early 1950s, when Eastern Europe was in the grip of Stalinism and many Western intellectuals placed their hopes in the new order of the East, this classic work reveals in fascinating detail the often beguiling allure of totalitarian rule to people of all political beliefs and its frightening effects on the minds of those who embrace it.

The Captive Mind (Penguin International Writers)

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."

Selected and Last Poems 1931-2004

Penguin Classics

The autobiography of the Nobel laureateBefore 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.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Sidgwick Jackson Ltd

Issa Valley

Literary

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