Facing the River: Poems (Signed First Edition)

Czeslaw Milosz

ISBN 10: 0880014040 / ISBN 13: 9780880014045

Published by Ecco, New York., 1995

About this Item

First edition, first printing. Hardbound. NEW. Fine in a fine dust jacket. A tight, clean copy, new and unread. NOT price-clipped. Comes with archival-quality mylar dust jacket protector. Shipped in well padded box. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page, his name only, using a beautiful fountain pen. POETRY-OF.

Seller Inventory # 3012

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Facing the River: Poems (Signed First Edition)
• Publisher: Ecco, New York.
• Publication Date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0880014040
• ISBN 13: 9780880014045
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: New
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

In the spring of 1989, exactly fifty years after he last saw - and seemed irrevocably cut-off from - the river valley he grew up in, Czeslaw Milosz was invited to return for a visit. The new government of independent Lithuania welcomed him back to the region of his childhood. Many of the poems in Facing the River record his experiences there. Here, the river of the Issa Valley symbolizes the river of time and also the river of mythology over which one cannot step twice. This is the river Milosz, the 1980 Nobel Laureate for Literature, faces while exploring ancient themes. He reflects upon the nature of imagination, human experience, good and evil, and the wonders of life on earth.
A poet of immense moral authority, in these later poems, the poems of old age, of a long look back at the catastrophic upheavals of the twentieth century, Milosz writes with amazing clarity and a precise vision. Despite the preponderance of his themes, he writes with the lightness of touch found only in the great masters. Using his own translations and those of Robert Hass, with whom he has worked closely, this volume achieves the one task that seems necessary and at the same time impossible - to invent a language comprehensible "to both the living and the dead."

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.