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

This is a translation of dialogues between the Polish Nobel laureate and two inquisitors. Organized in three sections covering Milosz's life in Poland, his writings, and his broad philosophical, theological, and literary concerns, these conversations provide a fascinating picture of the poet-essayist-novelist and his career, and of his commitment to realism and historical awareness. ISBN 0-15-122591-5: $27.95.

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.

Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) felt that part of his role as a poet and critic was to bear witness to bloodshed and terror as well as to beauty. He survived the Soviet invasion of his beloved Lithuania, escaped to Nazi-occupied Warsaw where he joined the Socialist resistance, then witnessed the Holocaust and the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto. After persecution and censorship triggered his defection in 1951, he found not relief but the anguish of solitude and obscurity. In the years of loneliness and labor, Miłosz continued writing poems and essays, learning to love his privacy and preoccupations and enjoying the devotion of his students at the University of California, Berkeley. International fame came like lightning when Miłosz won the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature. Czesław Miłosz: Conversations collects pieces from a wide range of sources over twenty-five years and includes an unpublished interview between Miłosz and his friend and fellow Nobel Laureate poet Joseph Brodsky. This volume acquaints us with a man whose work, life, and thought defy easy characterization. He is a sensualist with a scholar's penchant for history, as likely to celebrate Heraclitus as the hooks on a woman's corset. He is a devout but doubting Catholic, and a thinker tinged with a heretical sensibility. Cynthia L. Haven is a literary critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to the Washington Post Book World, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Her work also has been published in Civilization, the Georgia Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Cortland Review.

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