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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.

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Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz selects and introduces 300 of his favorite poems in this “magnificent collection” that ranges “widely across time and continents, from eighth century China to contemporary americanca” (San Francisco Chronicle). ... Read more

Customer Reviews (17)

An anthology for everyone!!
This is an anthology that can please most tastes. It makes the reader think about the human condition, existentialism and simple and memorable happenings.
It is wonderful to see so many big names such asHerbert, Hass, Milosz, Jeffers, and Szymborska, reunited in one book.

A Luminous World!!
A Book of Luminous Things celebrates the ordinary, the joy of living, the awareness gained through maturity and the poetic spirit. The poems which are presented are written by American, Chinese, Polish and French poets.
The anthology begins with a very short chapter titled "Epiphany" and ends with a chapter titled "History". Epiphany is a privileged awakening to a deeper reality hidden in things and persons whereas History is an awareness of the ugly reality of the unspeakable deeds of cruelty committed in times of war.
I loved specially the contributions of Herbert, Hass, Milosz, Levertov, Swir, Jeffers, and Szymborska.
A great work!

Joyce Akesson, author of Love's Thrilling Dimensions and The Invitation

Anyone can find great value in this collection
Poetry collections can be quite valuable things - picking one up rather than a body of work by a single author frees one of the apprehension that comes with committing to that author's work and the possibility that said author's work might not be worth owning in such a concentrated format. Conversely, a collection of multiple authors can open a reader up to poets they may have never come across otherwise. Indeed, that was one of Milosz's aims in putting together this compendium - to largely deflect the focus from the accepted and reliable canon (though Robert Frost and D.H. Lawrence do find their way in somehow) as well as provide work from an international selection of authors (though the concentration is frustratingly biased toward English, Polish and Chinese language works - not a bad thing in of itself, but it does play against the international appeal to some degree). The other criteria is that the poems be "short, clear, readable and, to use a compromised term, realist, that is, loyal toward reality and attempting to describe it as concisely as possible" (p. xv). The work rarely sways from this description, though like any good author Milosz isn't afraid to break his own rules. What you arrive at in the end, then, is a collection of easily approachable, short works of poetry that tend to shy away from a philosophical or fantastic focus. That is not to say that the philosophic and fantastic are not there in the poets' intentions, thoughts and/or subtext, but they do not overwhelm the pieces. As for the editor's contributions, he formats each page by introducing the poems with a few sentences about them printed above, but I found that the best way to read the work was to start with the poem itself and then read the editor's note. I felt that reading these notes undermined the sense of mystery and discovery that comes with navigating one's way through a new poem, though reading these thoughts after usually provided me with some new insight into the piece. However, I did feel that his interpretations left little room for argument and undermined the multiple layers that many of the works here comprise. It was as if there could be no individual readings that differed from what Milosz thought - though this was not always the case, and more obvious in his tone than his content. Another point of bother was his critique of some of the works; for example, his note on Jean Follain's "School and Nature" - "Frankly, the modernist technique consisting of unexpected associations is not to my liking, as at the end of this poem, in which drops of blood fall upon a road. In order to understand this, we must presume that there are hunters in the neighborhood, that they shot a bird, and that a wounded bird flies over the road" (p. 162). These are rare, but when they are there I can see no constructive purpose; if someone likes the image they may feel embarrassed or frustrated that the editor has forced them into arguing with them, and if they interpret the image a different way than his literal understanding, an unconfident reader may feel, again, embarrassed, and one more sure of themselves may feel irritated at the editor's apparent limitations. In any event, I can see no good in this type of note, especially in that it is printed before the poem itself and thus one may be inclined to read it before the poem, probably putting a damper on their experience. As I said before, however, this type of thing doesn't happen too often, and when it does we can forgive it, because, qualms aside, this is a very good collection of poetry. Though not every piece is awe inducing, to ask this would be somewhat ludicrous, and more often than not the works were quite enjoyable. I found many that touched me deeply, and almost all of them had multiple ways in which they could be interpreted, multiple layers and viewpoints, and thus one can come back to any number of poems again and again. Layers aside, these are all works that are short, approachable and enjoyable enough to be reread multiple times, and as long as one knows to read the editor's note after, not before as the format suggests, the poem itself, anyone can find great value in this collection.

Collection surprisingly wide scope, but terse.
Milosz has assembled a refreshingly broad spectrum of Chinese, European, and American poetry into a solid collection.What I like about the works is that the language is terse, short, and powerful, though not always a hit with me.The Chinese works are like this, succinct, subtle, and surprisingly accessible.

Truly luminous collection
A stellar collection of the world's poetry.Read the poetry first, though, before letting Milosz's comments sway you in any direction.Interesting to see what he thought, which wasn't always my take.Some lovely jewels of poetry.Some old, some new. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from World Literature Today, published by University of Oklahoma on September 22, 1999. The length of the article is 5694 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Lost in the "Earth-Garden": The Exile of Czeslaw Milosz.(Nobel Prize winner, poet)(Critical Essay)
Author: Louis Iribarne
Publication: World Literature Today (Refereed)
Date: September 22, 1999
Publisher: University of Oklahoma
Volume: 73Issue: 4Page: 637

Article Type: Critical Essay

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

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Published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of unbroken publication of The Polish Review, Fifty Years of Polish Scholarship contains selected articles from the premiere English-language quarterly dedicated to Polish studies.The selected articles cover all scholarly interests of this multi-disciplinary journal: history, literary criticism, painting, sculpture, sociology, philosophy and political science are all represented.Authors include: Stanisław Barańczak, Czesław Miłosz, Oskar Halecki, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Harold B. Segel, and others. ... Read more

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This expanded edition of Postwar Polish Poetry (which was originally published in 1965) presents 125 poems by 25 poets, including Czeslaw Milosz and other Polish poets living outside Poland.The stress of the anthology is on poetry written after 1956, the year when the lifting of censorship and the berakdown of doctrines provoked and explosion of new schools and talents.The victory of Solidarity in August 1980 once again opened new vistas for a short time; the coup of December closed that chapter. It is too early yet to predict the impact these events will have on the future of Polish poetry. ... Read more

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Chapters: Czesław Miłosz, Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, Jeremiah Curtin, Karolina Proniewska, Karl Dedecius, Stanisław Barańczak, Grazyna Miller, Leo Yankevich, Walter Whipple, Christopher Kasparek, Byambyn Rinchen, Marcel Weyland, Zygmunt Zaleski, Norbert Guterman, Stjepan Musulin, Andrej Žarnov, Shozo Yoshigami, Charles S. Kraszewski. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 90. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Seamus Heaney (born 13 April 1939, pronounced ) is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2006. He currently lives in Dublin. Heaney was born on 13 April 1939 at the family farmhouse called Mossbawn, between Castledawson and Toomebridge in Northern Ireland; he was the first of nine children. In 1953, his family moved to Bellaghy, a few miles away, which is now the family home. His father, Patrick Heaney, a local of Castledawson, was the eighth child of ten born to James and Sarah Heaney. Patrick was a farmer but his real commitment was to cattle-dealing, to which he was introduced by the uncles who had cared for him after the early death of his own parents. Heaney's mother came from the McCann family, whose uncles and relations were employed in the local linen mill and whose aunt had worked as a maid for the mill owner's family. The poet has commented on the fact that his parentage thus contains both the Ireland of the cattle-herding Gaelic past and the Ulster of the Industrial Revolution; he considers this to have been a significant tension in his background. Heaney initially attended Anahorish Primary School and when he was twelve-years-old, he won a scholarship to St. Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school situated in Derry. Heaney's brother, Christopher, was killed in a road accident at the ag...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=50920 ... Read more

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In this prophetic, millennial work, written by Russia's greatest philosopher at the end of the last century, the great task facing humanity as progress races to end history is the resistance to evil. Solovyov addresses what seem to him the three main trends of our time: economic materialism, Tolstoyan abstract moralism, and Nietzschean hubris--the first is already present, the second imminent, while the last is the apocalyptic precursor of the Antichrist. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Fascinating "platonic" dialogue treating human progress...
Solovyov's "Three Conversations" is a fascinating inquiry in the form of a platonic dialogue examining the nature of war and human progress. The initial subject for examination is more or less as follows: given the nature of man, is war an inevitable (a necessary, or even good) factor of history, or will humanity progress beyond the need of war?

Like a typical platonic dialogue, Solovyov too ends his work with a "mythos", an account of the Anti-Christ. The most intriguing part of the work, it is a story of the final conflict between Good and Evil. In some ways, it is the counterpoint to Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor".

A rich, thought-provoking book that is also a delight to read, I highly recommend Solovyov's "War, Progress and the End of History".

Fascinating "platonic" dialogue treating human progress...
Solovyov's "Three Conversations" is a fascinating inquiry in the form of a platonic dialogue examining the nature of war and human progress. The initial subject for examination is more or less as follows: given the nature of man, is war an inevitable (a necessary, or even good) factor of history, or will humanity progress beyond the need of war?

Like a typical platonic dialogue, Solovyov too ends his work with a "mythos", an account of the Anti-Christ.The most intriguing part of the work, it is a story of the final conflict between Good and Evil. In some ways, it is the counterpoint to Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor".

A rich, thought-provoking book that is also a delight to read, I highly recommend Solovyov's "War, Progress and the End of History".

Fascinating "platonic" dialogue treating human progress...
Solovyov's "Three Conversations" is a fascinating inquiry in the form of a platonic dialogue examining the nature of war and human progress.The initial subject for examination is more or less as follows:given the nature of man, is war an inevitable (a necessary, or even good) factor of history, or will humanity progress beyond the need of war?

Like a typical platonic dialogue, Solovyov too ends his work with a "mythos", an account of the Anti-Christ.The most intriguing part of the work, it is a story of the final conflict between Good and Evil.In some ways, it is the counterpoint to Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor".

A rich, thought-provoking book that is also a delight to read, I highly recommend Solovyov's "War, Progress and the End of History". ... Read more