Czeslaw Milosz: Selected and Last Poems, 1931-2004

The long-awaited paperback edition of Selected Poems, revised and updated with more than forty new poems never before published in English

2011 marks the centenary year of one of the twentieth centurys most important poets, Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz. To mark the occasion, Anthony Milosz has translated into English the last poems his father wrote, granting readers new insight into the work of an unparalleled master of the form.

Life opened for Czeslaw Milosz with the clash of civilizations in northeastern Europe. What unfolded around him was a century of catastrophe and madness: two world wars, revolutions, invasions, and the murders of tens of millions of people. In the thick of this upheaval, wide awake and in awe of living, Milosz tried to understand both history and the moment, with humble respect for the suffering of each individual. He wrote masterful poetry infused with a tireless spirit and a penetrating insight into fundamental human dilemmas and the staggering yet simple truth that “to exist on the earth is beyond any power to name.”

“One of the centurys most important poets.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“One of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest.”
—Joseph Brodsky

“Nobody tells the story of this age better than Czeslaw Milosz.”
—New Republic

Commemorating the centenary year of Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, Selected and Last Poems 1934 - 2004 is a sterling collection of some of the finest works of one the most revered poets of our time—including more than forty later poems new to this edition and never before published in English. Selected and Last Poems is a perfect introduction for poetry readers who might still be unfamiliar with this literary giants monumental body of work.

Czeslaw Milosz was born in 1911 in Szetejnie, Lithuania. He survived World War II in Warsaw, publishing in the underground press, after which he was stationed in New York, Washington, and Paris as a cultural attachÉ from Poland. He defected to France in 1951, and in 1960 he accepted a position at the University of California at Berkeley. Although his writing was banned in Poland, he was nevertheless awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 2004 in KrakÓw.