Czeslaw Milosz Research Articles

Il Carnevale come soglia del moderno. Permanenze franco-tedesche nella descrizione della festa romana in Corinne ou l’Italie di Germaine de Staël

At the beginning of the 1960s Czeslaw Milosz recorded Aleksander Wat’s memories on tape. The recordings were then published with the title Moj Wiek (1977) and translated into many languages. A real “Odyssey of a Polish intellectual”, as the subtitle of the American version (1988) suggested, Wat’s memoir is regarded as one of the most important testimonies of the atrocities of the last century. Finally, after many years, it has been translated into Italian, and will be published in the Spring of 2013. An excerpt from Il mio secolo is published in this article with permission from the Sellerio publishing house. It is taken from the eighteenth chapter, where Wat describes the first Soviet jail in which he was detained.

Drzwi do pokoju

Czeslaw Milosz’s poem Późna dojrzałość describes the experience of spiritual breakthrough. His past time hero feels incomplete. Full--time starts for him at the time of “awakening”. However, deep experience of “me” leads eventually beyond ego – towards the relations with others. The protagonist recognizes both a personal value of himself and of the others. It is the dignity of a “child of the King”, it has its source not so much in axiology, as in the ontology. The described spiritual breakthrough does not solve world’s problems, but introduces a new perspective of their understanding. It allows – thanks to a deep experience of hope – to anticipate the future harmony. Internal doors allow the hero to look into something which will become complete at the end of time, yet it now exists in the form of announcement hidden in the structure of reality.

Antynomie religii mitologicznej. Kilka uwag na marginesie Traktatu teologicznego Czesława Miłosza

The Noble Prize winner, Czeslaw Milosz in the last years of his life wrote a religious poem „The theological treatise”. In my paperI try to understand a religious dimension of a person who is the narrator of the poem. This is the voice of an experienced person who tries to find his way between two oppositions: the so called Polish catholicism (which is stereotypised as „mass” catholicism, unreflective, superficial etc) and a religion of a modern intellectual (with his religious hesitations, opposition to the catholic „mob” etc).I try to throw some light on a narrator’s perspective going back to some Molosz’s texts from the past. I hope the paper will be interesting to the scholars and others who are trying to solve the fascinating problem of the religious dimenssion of Czeslaw Milosz’s poetry.

Miłosz and Wat read Brzozowski

The paper discusses the impact of the thought of Stanislaw Brzozowski (1878–1911) on several Polish emigre writers, including Jozef Czapski and Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, but first of all Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) and Aleksander Wat (1900–1967). Milosz’ approach oscillated between early fascination through an unjust rejection during the war, due to the “appropriation” of Brzozowski’s thought by the right wing publicists, to the new phase of fascination after the war, culminating in the publication of a book on Brzozowski (A Man Among Scorpions, 1962) and prolonged in several important articles till the very end of his life. Wat’s approach shifted from the communist practice of “overcoming” Brzozowski through the affirmation of his criticism and rejection of catholic obscurantism to the process of the internalization of the catholic faith.

Czytając między wierszami. Rodzinna Europa Czesława Miłosza i jej angielski/amerykański przekład

The aim of this article is to discuss the problem of translating Polish prose, based on an analysis of a selection of samples taken from Czeslaw Milosz’s Native Realm. A Search for Self-Definition translated by Catherine S. Leach. The book documents specific relations between the Western and the Eastern Europe determined by historical provenance of the realms in question. The dichotomy of the collective European history has a profound influence on the reception of Polish literature among the Western audience. Native Realm showcases the issue perfectly – it is interesting in terms of its careful account of the historical and social development of the Continent. The perception of reality is conditioned by an inherent dissimilarity of experiences between the West and the East. The intention of Milosz was to provide an analysis of them and produce an insightful book addressed specifically to the Western readership. My discussion is an attempt to prove that the endeavour is doomed to failure due to the intrinsic differences between the cultures involved, as cultural inheritance determines the interpretation of historical facts and prompts dissimilar connotations. In the case of Native Realm, on the one hand, we encounter Milosz’s vision/imagination that is irreversibly rooted in the Slavic way of looking at things and, on the other, the distinctively dissimilar Western vantage point. Translating these differences appears to be a major challenge for any translator.

Medialne obrazy świata z perspektywy retorycznej (na przykładzie recepcji medialnej śmierci i pochówku Czesława Miłosza)

The article attempts to contribute to the discussion on the methods used in creating the world in the media, viewed from the rhetorical perspective. Implementations of the rhetorical principle of the adaptation of the utterance to the context and the situation of the audience to which exposition is directed (cf. K. Burke’s idea of identification and the so-called “identification” principle) are followed by both linguistic structuring of the utterance and the following argumentation may effect in the media content messages that are not only different but, frequently, create opposing images of the world. How far they may differ in their message is then shown with the example of the media reception of the death and the burial of Czeslaw Milosz manifested in the presentations offered by two daily newspapers: Gazeta Wyborcza and Nasz Dziennik. The excerpted source material shows how the multitude of receivers designed to be reached by different mass media communication channels and diversity in taste and expectations of audiences makes it possible for journalists to create subjective interpretations of the world. Once created and tailored to the context of the audience, they function in parallel pathways and, should a clash between them ensue, the only outcome is that their rhetorical nature gets even more accentuated. With these circumstances given, what we experience then is a situation when different truths collide, while each of them surfaces within a given context of human conversation and each is validated by its respective audience to be reached and goals to be attained.

Czesław Mılosz’un şiiri

The Polish poet and writer Czeslaw Milosz, who was awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, in the period before the Second World War, started the art of poetry calamitously and benefited from fascist developments during the war, and made use of Stalinist totalitarianism after the war, and then, made progress in poetry defending humanist and universal values with thematic diversity and a philosophically and intellectually stronger, historical and cultural backdrop.

Border Crossings

Border Crossings Charles P. Henderson I am delighted to introduce the contributors whose thought and writing make up this issue. As usual our December issue features articles that have come to us in the past year or so without having been solicited for a particular theme or topic. Still, there is often a synchronicity at play as articles amazingly appear in our inbox and, as they make their way through our peer review process, a theme slowly emerges. We open with a work of collaboration between theologian Björn Krondorfer and artist Karen Baldner. Karen is a visual artist who comes from a Jewish‐German family persecuted during the Nazi era. She grew up in post‐Shoah Germany but today resides in Bloomington, Indiana. Björn was also born and raised in Germany, emigrating to the United States at the age of 24, he has pursued a career in the academy, writing and teaching. Their article is a remarkable example of interdisciplinary work at the boundary of religion and the arts; it conveys, through the imaginative use of their respective mediums, a journey in which body, mind, and soul are fully engaged. At one level, the story of their collaboration is about making books; at another level, it is a pilgrimage of self‐discovery in which reader is invited to share. Regular readers will remember that we published two entire issues focusing on the life and work of Thomas Merton not long ago (v58:4 and v59:1). Herein Christopher Pramuk brings Merton into renewed conversation with his long‐time friend, Polish‐American writer Czeslaw Milosz, who would have been 100 this coming June. Of course, their actual conversations and transcontinental exchange of letters has been well documented elsewhere: “Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz” (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1996). In this piece, Christopher suggests that as they struggled at the intersections of a deep faith tradition and the contradictions of contemporary culture, as Catholics and as poets, from their own very distinctive perspectives, they each point to that which others fail to see: reflecting upon the surfaces of this all too mundane terrain, there is, “the lightning flash of God.” Next in line is Elaine Padilla’s “Border‐Crossing and Exile: A Latina’s Theological Encounter with Shekhinah.” Already the patterns for this issue are beginning to emerge, as Elaine’s contribution, like the others, has a strong narrative involving a personal journey across boundaries of time and space. Our writers are clearly mining rich veins of their life’s story for a gold that enriches our appreciation of how “religion” encompasses the entire human enterprise. I love it when writers root their thought in the particularity of their own experience, while speaking to the common dilemmas and challenges that in one way or another all of us encounter. Edward K. Kaplan does the same as he narrates a series of conversations with Howard Thurman, crossing the boundaries between his own Judaism and Thurman’s Christianity. It is hoped that most of our readers have encountered the writing of Howard Thurman. For those who have not, Kaplan’s article will introduce you to the wonder of a man whose ability to communicate a depth of religious experience is unmatched among present‐day writers or preachers. For those who have already been inspired by Thurman, Kaplan will remind you of what made Thurman so special. As Kaplan puts it: “Thurman … train(s) us to receive God as guarantor of human sanctity. Black, beautiful, and universally human, Howard Thurman reminds us that we are all partners in redeeming the human family.” As we, in the U.S., approach the tenth anniversary of 9/11, we can look back upon a decade in which religion has played a far more visible role in civil society. For better or for worse, we have focused far more attention upon the role of religion in our political life. Arguably, as Americans, we have been enthralled with the topic. Our next contributor, Yelena Mazour‐Matusevich, forces a change of scenery. And she does so with gusto, drawing our attention to a country in which religion, or even, dare I say it, “spirituality...

1989–2009: ‘In Poland everything is possible, even changes for the better’

I came across my title in a book prepared for Adam Michnik's sixtieth birthday by some of his close friends and admirers. The book included many reminders of an earlier Poland, including a transcript of a telephone conversation of 1986. Michnik was in Poland, recently released from yet another stint in jail. On the other end of the line was a group in New York, celebrating the publication of the English version of his Letters from Prison. Holding the phone and relaying questions from the group in New York was Czeslaw Milosz. My title comes from the answer Michnik gave to the question how are things in at the moment? 'As my master, Antoni Slonimski used to say, Poland is a weird place where inexplicable things can happen: in everything is possible, even changes for the better.' I begin with this line for two reasons: one, because I am struck by how easy it is to forget what life in (and throughout the Communist Bloc) was like, and what was imaginable, only 20-odd years ago. The other is to remind those who have forgotten, or who never knew, how much has changed in this relatively brief period. I first visited in 1985. It was a deep experience for me, personally, morally, politically. I had followed the fortunes of Solidarnosc very closely, read everything I could, and knew a lot about communism; I was a long-time anticommunist, indeed congenitally so since I had inherited it from my parents, who were refugees from Nazism, exiles from communist Poland. I even spoke a version of Polish, albeit nurtured on Bondi Beach. I cared about what was happening in Poland, and I thought that I knew, more or less, what was going on there. I had no expectations, however, of some of the most striking things - as striking indeed as many of them were banal - that I found there. I was so affected by them that I started to write a kind of intellectual journalism - quite un-academic, baring my soul - for the first time in my life. My first article - which appeared in Australia, the United States, Italy and, I believe, in in 1986 - was called 'Stalemated in Poland. Life as if . The title comes from the discordant combination that presented of, on the one hand, almost total stalemate between what it became conventional to divide as ' spoleczenstwo' (society) and 'wladza' (the power), and on the other, of what Timothy Garton Ash called 'the principle of as if: try to live as if you live in a free country. Garton Ash captured well the extent to which Solidarity had made that principle flesh in the lives not merely of the Polish inteligencja, but of pretty well everyone. As he wrote: The Solidarity revolution was a revolution of consciousness. What it changed, lastingly, was not institutions or property relations or material circumstances, but people's minds and attitudes... millions of people across the country... suddenly found that they no longer needed to live the double life, that they could say in public what they thought in priva te... For a few months it really was as if they lived in a free country. And even when, after martial law was imposed, it no longer was possible to believe they were in such a country, people spoke without restraint even to foreigners like me. That was all exhilarating and exciting, but it was also what I had been led to expect by my reading. What I had not expected was much more mundane. It was the unrelieved pallor, the greyness of everyday life in Poland; pallid and grey and sad and hard. The greyness was real and inescapable but it was also a kind of representation, a metaphor, for the pervasive tone and texture of everyday life. I wrote at the time: The image that kept recurring to me was of a curtain, not iron any more, too full of holes; but thick, drab, shabbily patched, unrelievedly grey and draped over nearly everything one saw; everything that didn't move... it is not simply to do with specific material things. …

The Contribution of the Polish Intelligentsia to the Breakthrough of 1989

In his recollections of the events of June 1979, the former Solidarity advisor Adam Michnik has described this moment in history as a time of three Polish miracles. First, John Paul II returns triumphantly to Poland as the Pope, making a mockery of Stalin's jibe about the Pope having no divisions; then the second miracle occurs a little more than a year later in August 1980, when Lech Walcsa leads the shipyard strike and the first non-communist trade union is formed within the Soviet Bloc. The third miracle occurred some two months later when the exiled poet Czeslaw Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Michnik wrote: John Paul II became the emblem of Poland's Catholic Church at its best. The Gdansk strike and Lech Walcsa became symbols and the crowning point of the Polish workers' rebellion and Czeslaw Milosz symbolized the defiance of Poland's intelligentsia. Those three symbols marked the three trends within Solidarity. One of them stressed the movement's national and Catholic character, another followed the working class vindication line, another still concentrated on democratic and humanist values. These tendencies were neither inconsistent nor conflicting; for us they were complementary.1 This chapter will focus on the humanist values of the Polish intelligentsia, which were not only significant for the third miracle of 1980 but greatly contributed to the final breakthrough of the summer of 1989. For a whole decade, they offered sustained intellectual critiques of existing Marxism and reflections on the alternatives available in Western political thought. Included within this body of work were the contributions of Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), who was both a Polish intellectual and a powerful world figure. While members of the Polish intelligentsia were offering critiques of various forms of totalitarian government from the 1930s onwards, the work of anticommunist scholars and writers became more organised in the 1970s with the formation of the Workers' Defence Committee (Komitet Obrony Robotnikow), known by its initials KOR. KOR was distinctive in that it was an initiative of intellectuals to assist workers and their families, particularly those prisoners detained after labour strikes in 1976. It raised money through the sale of its underground publications, through fundraising groups in Paris and London, and grants from Western institutions. KOR sent open letters of protest to the communist government as well as organising legal and financial support for the families of detainees. The group also smuggled in printing machines to produce its underground publications such as Robotnik, a biweekly that had a circulation of about 20 000 by 1978, and to publish books under the banner of its own publishing house called NOWA.2 The latter were often Polish translations of works published in Western countries that were regarded as politically dangerous by the communist authorities. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its esoteric critique of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum were prominent in this category. Jan Jozef Lipski concluded that the achievement of NOWA was 'truly impressive', with more than 100 publications including political and economic works, which were 'indispensable to an understanding of intellectual and political culture'.3 In 1977, KOR leaders collaborated with intellectuals in the Warsaw community to establish the 'Flying University' (Uniwersytet Latajqcy), a series of lectures organised by unofficial student groups to discuss political topics that could not be debated in public. The concept was revived from a similar organisation that had operated between 1885 and 1905 in the context of Imperial Russian domination of the Polish capital.4 As a consequence of their collaboration with the organisers of the Flying University, KOR members were harassed by the secret police, beaten up and in some cases jailed. KOR, however, became an inspiration for the nation when the Polish government declared amnesty for jailed workers in the spring of 1977. …

Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky: fellowship of poets

This intimate portrayal of the friendship between two icons of twentieth-century poetry, Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky, highlights the parallel lives of the poets as exiles living in America and Nobel Prize laureates in literature. To create this truly original work, Irena Grudzinska Gross draws from poems, essays, letters, interviews, speeches, lectures, and her own personal memories as a confidant of both Milosz and Brodsky. The dual portrait of these poets and the elucidation of their attitudes toward religion, history, memory, and language throw a new light on the upheavals of the twentieth-century. Gross also incorporates notes on both poets' relationships to other key literary figures, such as W. H. Auden, Susan Sontag, Seamus Heaney, Mark Strand, Robert Haas, and Derek Walcott.

Can Poetry Matter?

ESSAY Can Poetry Matter? Margaret Randall Margaret Randall isa feminist poet, writer, photographer, and social activist. She firstread the following essay at the Stir Poetry Festival inAlbuquerque, New Mexico, inSeptember 2008. The panel was organized by Albuquerque poet Lisa Gill,who titled it inhonor ofDana Gioia's 1991 essay by the same name. All poets and readers of poetry ask the question: Can poetry matter? We may pose thisquestion indifferent ways. We may ask ifpoetry canmatter in thewider world, if ithas thepower to change or even impact how we think or feel,what we believe, how we act, what we want for ourselves and others.Will it win my lover's heart?Keep my children safe?Can it reverse climate change, feed thehungry, effec tively support justice or reverse injustices, end war? Can poetry bring about lastingpeace? The question is not whether an individual poem or series of poems have been important to people throughout history. They have been, and powerfully. Such diverse poets as Sappho, Basho, Nguyen Du,1 Mevlana Rumi, C?sar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, N?zim Hikmet, R. M. Rilke, Ho Chi Mirth,Walt Whitman, Czeslaw Milosz, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, and Joy Harjo are only a few of thosewhose work contin ues to change lives. The question is:Can poetry as process and product?as genre?matter? And ifso, how? We may ask more intimate questions about poetry, less ambitious perhaps but clearlymean ingful for our human community. For example: Can poetry nurture hope, can itmake us aware, teach, comfortus in times of grief,heal, inspire? What is poetry's responsibility to language? Can it revealmysteries, solve problems? Can it shock us to awareness and action, help us negotiate or persuade? What about oral tradition, everyday conversation, accent, inflection, color, risk? How does poetry enrich culture, help write history, retrieve or preserve memory, provide vision and perspective? Inwhat ways does itsupplement or perhaps even replace the lies thatcome down tous inhistorybooks written by thevictors, biography, essays, even the most thoughtfuljournalism? Poetrymattered to my friendCary Herz. Just a couple ofweeks before her death fromovarian cancer, she senta goodbye email toher friends.She ended hermessage with aMary Oliver poem, her parting gift. The poem was "Blackwater Woods," and some of the lines thatcontinue to sustainme are "Look, the trees/ are turning/ theirown bod ies / intopillars // of light... everything / Ihave ever learned //in my lifetime/ leadsme back to this: the fires/ and theblack riverof loss /whose other side // is salvation,whose meaning / none of us will ever know ..." The gift allowed us to breathe when we received it,and liftedus in recognitionwhen the rabbi read it at Cary's graveside. That poem con tinues to remind us of our friend, her gentle sensi bility,meaningful photography, fierce resistance, and gracious farewell.But itdoes much more than that.The lessons itholds move on many levels. I can think ofmany such instanceswhen a par ticularpoem or group ofpoems tempered sorrow, imbuedme with courage, flashed an unexpected image, or simply expressed an idea or emotion as nothing else could. Poems have been smuggled out of prisons, shared on battlefields, passed fromhand tohand and generation to generation, scratched on walls, written in diaries and recipe books, distributed on street corners, and carried cross-county by hobos riding the freighttrainsof the 1930s. They have inhabited public spaces and been whispered 201World Literature Today in ears, bringing otherwise indescribable events and people to life in stunningways. Their humor makes us laugh. Their truthcan take our breath away. Their concise complexity may transmit more, and more powerfully, than any piece of prose. Their ability to evoke emotion oftenmakes thempurveyors of experience inways thatmore expository writing cannot. It is obvious that poetry changes language. Cultural change influences what is permissible, what may be judged redundant or acceptable. What startles or reinvents later nestles securely in the lexicon. It is also clear that each new commu nicative tool?the telegraph, telephone, computer, cell phone, iPod, Blackberry, Kindle, and other constantly evolving electronic devices?can reju venate poetry. Chatting, twittering, and text mes saging push language toward brevity?urge us to say what we mean, and now. But they also do more. Typographical layout and rhythmemerge fromhow...

The Eternal Moment

Czeslaw Milosz, the great Polish poet and essayist who died in 2004, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. Just after the publication of A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry and his memoir, Road‐side Dog, I sat down with him in July, 1999, in the cozy, book‐lined living room of his cottage on Grizzly Peak Road overlooking the San Francisco Bay shimmering in the distance. After the Cold War he returned in the summers to Krakow, but otherwise lived in Berkeley.

History matters: contemporary poetry on the margins of American culture

In this capacious and energetic volume, Ira Sadoff argues that poets live and write within history, our artistic values always reflecting attitudes about both literary history and culture at large. History Matters does not return to the culture war that reduced complex arguments about human nature, creativity, identity, and interplay between individual and collective identity to slogans. Rather, Sadoff peels back layers of clutter to reveal the important questions at the heart of any complex and fruitful discussion about the connections between culture and literature. Much of our most adventurous writing has occurred at history's margins, simultaneously making use of and resisting tradition. By tracking key contemporary poets - including John Ashbery, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Louise Gluck, Czeslaw Milosz, Frank O'Hara, and C. K. Williams - as well as musing on jazz and other creative enterprises, Sadoff investigates the lively poetic art of those who have grappled with late twentieth-century attitudes about history, subjectivity, contingency, flux, and modernity. In plainspoken writing, he probes the question of the poet's capacity to illuminate and universalize truth. Along the way, we are called to consider how and why art moves and transforms human beings.

From the Interior: Poems 1995-2005 by Petr Borkovec, Justin Quinn

Petr Borkovec FROMTHE INTERIOR Poems 1995 - 2005 Tr.m?>Lued fro;n the ( by Justin Quinn idiom into forms that are power ful and new, has been compellingly captured by the translators in this volume. As she said in a recent interview: "Allmy lifeI've been say ing that I serve poetry. Lately Ihave begun to see thatwhat I am really doing is serving language. Poetry is the instrument, the medium. I have an almost religious attachment to language." (Editorial note: Three of Anghelaki-Rooke's Penelope poems appeared in the January 2009 issue ofWLT.) PeterConstantine New York Petr Borkovec. From the Interior: Poems 1995-2005. Justin Quinn, tr. Bridgend, Wales. Seren (ipg, distr.). 2008. 120 pages. ?9.99/$ 19.95. isbn 978-1-85411-472-3 It's been twentyyears since the fall of the BerlinWall. What has hap pened politically and sociologically in the countries ofCentral and East ern Europe continues to be docu mented with ardor. Surprisingly, however, the new literatures are yet to attract any noticeable attention, particularly in the United States, where, say, Hungarian or Romanian writers cannot rely on the generos ityof the European Union to help distribute their works. Additionally, some believe that thewriting artists who came of age in the 1990s have simply not produced anything of lasting value. In Poland, for exam ple, the criticsargue that thedecade belonged to old masters, mainly Czeslaw Milosz andWislawa Szym borska, rather than the darlings of the media, the so-called "Barbar ians" inspired by the freewheeling poetry of theNew York School (see WLT, May 2004,48-52). What about the formerCzecho slovakia's western half, today's Czech Republic? While theworks of Holub and Seifertare relativelywell known and celebrated, albeit not as much as thoseof the legendaryprose writers Hrabal and Kundera, hardly anything isknown about contempo rary Czech poetry. Naturally, this slim volume of one of the country's rising stars is a welcome trailblazer. Unlike his famous predecessors, Petr Borkovec, who was born in 1970, is neither political nor allegorical. Instead, he is a poet at home with razor-sharp imagery and sensual details: "The eye somehow / (helped by the iceboxbulb, theskylights,and all old ballads of thehills) / divides up time." Befitting a poet whose world continues tobe fragmentedby history, change, and his own being, his use of language ismicroscopic. In fact,many of these poems are snapshots of thepoet's thoughtsand surroundings, carefullydistilled and articulated. For example, one poem opens with "the topmost window open like a lid?" and ends with "Meanwhile the crowds and crowds of eyes, inwaves, / go in the air likehands, repeatedly, / and speech E explodes with colours. Suddenly E eyes / take in theharbour's complex E panoply." Initially, themuted voice = recalls the cadences of a mind hard E at work comprehending the mul- E tiplicity of the outside world, but E the ending is somewhat orgasmic, E acknowledging thatthe insufficiency E of language can be liberating.Con- E sequently, in Borkovec's poems the E ensuing dialogue is always internal E and external. E This is a risky proposition, E mainly because thedredging of per- E ception can be frustratinglyephem- E eral. Additionally, the procession E of observations?the word window E features throughout the collection? E gets tiringafter a while. Still, like a E skilled artisan, Borkovec breathes E life into his lines one syllable at a E time. Interestinglyenough, the col- E lection concludes with a fascinating E memoir, written in prose, recalling E the poet's three granddaughters. It E is the last few sentences that illu- E minate the purpose behind Bor- E kovec's method, particularly when E hewrites, "More oftennow Idescribe E thatwhich I did not see." Indeed, E what keeps his work fromunravel- E ing is the subtletyof thedetails and E theresurrectingnature of theproject E itself, which ismore spiritual than E materialistic, and theway the poet E creates a mosaic of past and present, E the real and the imagined, without E emphasizing one over theother. E Piotr Florczyk E Wilmington,Delaware E Yearn Hong Choi.Moon of New York. E Baltimore, Maryland. PublishAmerica. E 2008. 105 pages. $16.95. isbn 978-1- 1 60610-780-1 I The recurring themes...

‘Let the Fall begin’: Thomas Kinsella's European dimension

This paper will explore the European dimension to Thomas Kinsella's work, in particular the Germanic influences: Goethe, Thomas Mann, Rilke, Mahler, and Carl Jung; as well as the influence of François Villon and Teilhard de Chardin. I will show how these influences inform Kinsella's attempt to forge an alternative to the ‘classicist’ aesthetic of his poetry of the 1950s. The essay has two purposes: firstly, to outline the under-acknowledged European aspect of Kinsella's development, and secondly to show briefly how Kinsella's aesthetic trajectory and the concerns underpinning his poetry have correspondences with the work of his European near-contemporary Czeslaw Milosz.

Citizen at the Edge: Czeslaw Milosz and the Poetry of Redemption

The author is haunted by the painful collective images of her troubled times, and by the ghost of her father who was passionate about politics and would be horrified, were he still alive, at how the basic principles of our democracy have been undermined in recent history. In active imagination the author has a dialogue with her dead father and introduces him to the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, a man of his generation and, like her father, a “Child of Europe,” which is a title of a Milosz poem. Born in Lithuania, Milosz had to contend with the threats to his country from both the right and from the left, from the Nazis and from Stalinist Russia. His poetry helps the author, in dialogue with the ghost of her father, find a way to confront the horrors of her own time, while cultivating a religious attitude.

Filíocht Nua: New Poetry

Filíocht Nua:New Poetry John McAuliffe The Quiet Life Is it this you want, the still center of the quiet life, its ticking clock, the white goods' hum and on, off click, next-door's pipes and creaking stair? It could be, let's face it, anywhere, the usual birds sleep in its shadow and from every side, in stereo, a surf of noise going who knows where, traffic clutching, flown, a landing plane, the trains' two-beat come and go . . . and outside the mirrored window, closer to home, in the tended garden and the undergrowth, what rustles there, or its wake, might be grass stirring or, on their way, even your discarded half-read papers. [End Page 37] * * * Town I leave tomorrow and the night finds me, where else, down by the river, its current quiet and regular as a pulse, silvery dark where the banked trees grow around the outflow pipes. A bird takes off nearby and goes to ground in a commuter's site: its unpainted cement is either half-finished or half-dismantled. farther off I can see, bright as an oilrig, the Co-op shine and foam, humming its bottom line. The town's lit up but no one comes back to reminisce intent as some evangelist smashing fossils, making a religion out of feeling homesick. empty river, indifferent night; no joke to leave, grow older, return and say, then what? On it all, the glowing river twists the ground shut. [End Page 38] * * * Tinnitus My father's tinnitus is like the hiss off a water cooler,only louder. And it doesn't just stop like, say, a hand-dryer—the worst is it comes and goes. Or you shine a light on it and it looks permanent as the sea, a tideless sea that won't go away. The masker he's been prescribed is a tiny machine, an arc of white noise that blacks out a lot but can't absorb the interference totally any more than you or I—taking the air, stirring milk into coffee, daydreaming through the six o'clock news, trying to sleep on a wet night— can simply switch off what's always there, a particular memory nagging away, the erosive splash off a little river wearing away the road, say, on the Connor Pass, a day out, through which he'd accelerate in the flash, orange Capri. [End Page 39] * * * Road Safety I check the convex mirror in the hedge across the way and see, beyond plantations of fir and rowan, the roadside monument to the killings of 1918 and 1921 and, up the road, away from this house on its bed of unraveled blue pencil and its hill of water, the empty crossroads for Knocknagoshel and Duagh but I am seen too in the hedge around this convex mirror, wild with blackberries and gooseberries, dribbling mice, and a hen pheasant that will soon wander the grassy margin, among the thistles and the ragwort and the nettles and will halt there a while, quiet out, seeing time pass, looking in every direction. [End Page 40] * * * The Hundred Towns "There is no capital of the world." Czeslaw Milosz We negotiate ring road, tunnel and ferry but by noon GMT are nowhere, i.e., an endless suburb stacked and balanced like washing up. The day out seems set to fray into a relief map of noise the kids crying where until you call a halt and we abandon the car and follow a sign pointing east: we reach the beaten path, tar and mud, and trundle buggies up blind, rising corners, piggyback past tourists consulting an A–Z and a man with children who smiles at the sight of us: "Another day in paradise. . . ." In a mile, an hour, we lay out the picnic, a tartan rug on the side of a hill, greenly adrift in the public park: a barbecue smokes the wind, a lean-to of a caff hosts wake-up karaoke, blues and big band [End Page 41] (someone murders "It's oh so quiet"), quad bikes buzz and weave earning a crowd with their figure of eight and across the river Canary Wharf glitters...

An Historian's Notes for a Miloszan Humanism

The awkward term has served as the title of too many movements and ideals, and seems drained of significance, like a wrinkled old balloon. To speak of revising and retrieving the term for a new form of humanism, as will be done here, is to invite many possible misconceptions. In a strict, traditional meaning, in the context of Renaissance humanism and its later reflections, humanism refers to an attempt to affirm the dignity of the human spirit, and to renew modern culture by a return to antiquity. These goals were to be achieved through the study of human things ( res humana), by means of scholarship and literature, history and the arts. In regard to the possibilities for humanism today, and drawing on the poetry and essays of Czeslaw Milosz, I wish to suggest the following theses:

Writing Lough Derg: from William Carleton to Seamus Heaney

The overarching purpose of this volume is to show how a discrete tradition of writing about Lough Derg helped contemporary Irish poets rescue, metaphysical inquiry from the grip of nationalism. Linked with the supernatural from pagan times, Lough Derg had by the early twentieth century become an icon of the fusion of the Catholic Church and the Irish nation. Surveying literary treatments of Lough Derg from William Carleton through Denis Devlin, Patrick Kavanagh, and ultimately Seamus Heaney, Peggy O'Brien addresses the role of spirituality in an increasingly cosmopolitan, postmodern, post-Catholic Ireland. O'Brien's extended consideration of Heaney culminates in an insightful juxtaposition with Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet who also struggled with the conflation of Catholicism and patriotism.