Volume of poetry - that reaches hights which poetry only seldom achieves, both through its artistic quality and through its extraordinarily personal tone - of the laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature...
It - Miłosz' first volume of poetry for six years, is a real cause for celebration. It reaches hights which poetry only seldom achieves, both through its artistic quality and through its extraordinarily personal tone. Miłosz is breathtakingly sincere in this volume, but without a trace of exhibitionism. On the contrary: those confessions are particularly dramatic in which the author writes of his realisation, his awareness, that however much he tries to be absolutely honest in settling accounts with himself, he will never be able to cross a particular boundary behind which a mask or a pretence conceal the most painful and shameful things, where only loneliness and pangs of conscience are left. This "sounding out the darkness", these attempts to touch, name and exorcise the evils of the world, are nothing less than revelationary. And despite everything, they are encouraging, because after reading the book, one has the feeling that the "It" - the darkness, barbarianism and suffering - have been overcome by a "radiating light" which is coming ever closer.
Czesław Miłosz (b. 1911) poet, novelist, essayist and translator. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.
- Czesław Miłosz
It / To
Znak, Kraków 2000
© Czesław Miłosz
155 x 235, 98 pages, hardcover
ISBN 83-7006-577-5