Second Space: New Poems » (Reprint)

Czeslaw Milosz was born in 1911 in Szetejnie, Lithuania. He survived World War II in Warsaw, publishing in the underground press, after which he was stationed in New York, Washington, and Paris as a cultural attachÉ from Poland. He defected to France in 1951, and in 1960 he accepted a position at the University of California at Berkeley. Although his writing was banned in Poland, he was nevertheless awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 2004 in KrakÓw.

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."

The New York Times - Meghan O'Rourke

… the story Milosz is telling is our story, an American one as well as a European one, about broken faith and lost meanings in need of repair. His curiosity about intellectual questions -- and about the endurance of memory -- had that particular quality of persistence that is itself a branch of genius. There are certain human beings who have the capacity to ask the question ''Why?'' long after everyone else has tired of it (and, perhaps, its attending answer). ''Crooked'' they may be, like the rest of us -- and yet they set themselves apart by virtue of will. ''I should be dead already, but there is work to do,'' Milosz writes here, in the lovely, fragmented ''Notebook.'' Alas, his work is now in our hands. But our job -- reading it -- is among the most rewarding ones imaginable.