Selected and Last Poems: 1931-2004

By Seamus Heaney, Czesław Miłosz, Lex Croucher

Book Overview

"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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0062095889
• ISBN13: 9780062095886
• Release Date: November 2011
• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.27 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Calling Us Back to Ourselves

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.