Collected Poems - Softcover

Czeslaw Milosz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0880011742 ISBN 13: 9780880011747

Publisher: Ecco, 1990

Synopsis

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

About this title

About the Author

Czeslaw Milosz was born in Szetejnie, Lithuania, in 1911. He worked with the Polish resistance movement in Warsaw during World War II and was later stationed in Paris and Washington, D.C., as a Polish cultural attaché. He defected to France in 1951, and in 1960 he accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, and was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He died in 2004.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ARTIFICER

Burning, he walks in the stream of flickering letters, clarinets,
machines throbbing quicker than the heart, lopped-off heads, silk
canvases, and he stops under the sky

and raises toward it his joined clenched fists.

Believers fall on their bellies, they suppose it is a monstrance that
shines,

but those are knuckles, sharp knuckles shine that way, my friends.

He cuts the glowing, yellow buildings in two, breaks the walls into
motley halves;
pensive, he looks at the honey seeping from those huge
honeycombs:
throbs of pianos, children's cries, the thud of a head banging against
the floor.
This is the only landscape able to make him feel.

He wonders at his brother's skull shaped like an egg,
every day he shoves back his black hair from his brow,
then one day he plants a big load of dynamite
and is surprised that afterward everything spouts up in the
explosion.
Agape, he observes the clouds and what is hanging in them:
globes, penal codes, dead cats floating on their backs, locomotives.

They turn in the skeins of white clouds like trash in a puddle.
While below on the earth a banner, the color of a romantic rose,

flutters,
and a long row of military trains crawls on the weed-covered

tracks.

Wilno, 1931

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0880011742
• ISBN 13: 9780880011747
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 528