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

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."

A Nobel laureate reflects upon poetry's testimony to the events of our tumultuous time.

To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. No to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness. -- Czeslaw Milosz

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

Milosz's poems move forward while attending to his past, and deal with how his Lithuania, and Europe at large, maintain their habit of partial memory and forgetting. In these poems, such as the sequence Lithuania. After Fifty-Two Years, Wanda (about the painter Wanda Telakowska), Sarajevo, Translating Anna Swir on an Island in the Caribbean, visible worlds exist and sensations of body and soul exist in memory, a living resource and not a nostalgia. Milosz remains aware of suffering but aware too, of the poet's duty to celebrate. Facing the River does not have the tone of finality, but of a restless seeking which finds.