Selected and Last Poems 1931-2004 – Czeslaw Milosz (2014)

This selection brings together the most beautiful and powerful poems by Czeslaw Milosz, spanning his entire writing life. In poems such as “Cafe,” he considers the upheaval, revolutions and two world wars he witnessed, while “My Faithful Mother Tongue” reflects his loyalty to his native Polish language. He recalls his schooldays in “The World” and, in “Bypassing Rue Descartes,” remembers the Paris streets of his student years, showing both tenderness and clear-eyed fury towards those who shaped his experiences. Writing not about abstract emotions but about the horrors and beauty he observed directly, Milosz reveals the joy-bringing potential of the poetry to which he devoted his life. Czeslaw Milosz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. Born in Lithuania when it was still part of the Russian Empire, he lived much of his life in Poland or in exile in California. He wrote The Captive Mind, one of the definitive books on totalitarianism, as well as vivid and morally authoritative works about his childhood, his experiences under Nazism and the tragedy of Central Europe.