"Man has been given to understand/ that he lives only by the grace of those in power./ Let him therefore busy himself sipping coffee, catching butterflies." So muses Polish migr poet and Nobel laureate Milosz in one of his earlier poems, and such might be the principle guiding this most recent collection of his writings. Bits and pieces of memoir are ranged in alphabetical order, making up a curious glossary of a life lived in Poland and the United States and a literary career spanning six decades. Reminiscences of Poland before, during and after WWII occupy much of the volume. Even when Milosz is chronicling his life since he settled permanently in California in 1960, after a period of exile in France, his memories center on friends made in childhood at school in Wilno. Brief character sketches are intermixed with reflections on subjects like Milosz's sense of obligation to the Polish language and Polish literary tradition, his admiration of poets like Walt Whitman and Joseph Brodsky, and, more generally, on themes like curiosity, fame and terror. It is these sections that will engage American readers, who elsewhere are likely to flounder in a sea of names. The fragments of autobiography collected in this edition represent only a selection from the texts of two Polish ABCs, and readers will be grateful for the culling. It is difficult to escape the sense thatDlike butterflies in a dusty caseDthe scraps of memory affixed here have lost their living glitter."--Summary from Publisher

Presents a collection of musings on a variety of subjects, listed alphabetically, including literary characters, historical figures, and real and imagined places.

A timely and informative collection, A Poetry Criticism Reader brings together eleven essays and reviews that constitute some of the best and most illuminating poetry criticism from the past decade.In his introduction to the book, editor-poet Jerry Harp gives an overview of poetry criticism and its pluralistic traditions after the high modernist years of T. S. Eliot. In the essays that follow, esteemed critics and poets explore varied aspects of poetics, make aesthetic statements, relate to postmodernism with its array of meanings, and examine particular poets and poems. Works by Donald Justice, James Tate, Paul Muldoon, Jorie Graham, Seamus Heaney, and Czeslaw Milosz are among those studied. None of the pieces was written in direct response to any of the others; nonetheless, they complement each other, forming a kind of dialogue. Because editors Jerry Harp and Jan Weissmiller selected writers who give us a broad range of perspectives on our postmodern moment as they reach into history for context, the collection offers students---the next generation of poets and critics---and their teachers exemplary models of fine critical writing and thought.

Nobel laureate poet Czeslaw Milosz personal selection of 300 of the world's greatest poems written throughout the ages and around the world.

In this collection of essays, Stephen Watson turns to the writers who have endured for him; to the places that have formed him; and always to the nature of writing and literature itself. The range is remarkable: he moves from Leonard Cohen to Dante, from Albert Camus to Allen Ginsberg, not excepting Czeslaw Milosz and T.S. Eliot. Closer to home, there are essays on Robben Island and the meaning of the Cedarberg. More personally, movingly, a final section of the book returns to the site of a love affair, the birth of a daughter, and what it is that defines his native city, Cape Town. Whatever Watson touches on, he gives substance to the line from Pasternak that provides this collection with its title: 'the music in the ice'. In Watson's hands the essay form itself becomes an instance of that music. Here is a book that demonstrates again why Justin Cartwright has called Stephen Watson 'South Africa's foremost essayist'.

Collects five decades of essays by the Nobel Prize-winning writer, covering topics including war, human nature, faith, communism, and Polish culture.

Now available in English for the first time, this collection brings together some of noted poet Czeslaw Milosz's early essays and letters, composed in German-occupied Warsaw during the winter of 1942-43.