An intimate portrayal of the friendship between two icons of twentieth-century poetry...highlights the paralles lives of the poets as exiles living in America and as Nobel Prize laureates in literature...Irena Grudzinska Gross draws on poems, essays, letter, interviews, speeches, lectures, and her own personal memories as a confidant of both Milosz and Brodsky. -- pub. description.

An intimate portrayal of the friendship between two icons of twentieth-century poetry ... highlights the parallel lives of the poets as exiles living in America and as Nobel Prize laureates in literature ... Irena Grudzinska Gross draws on poems, essays, letter, interviews, speeches, lectures, and her own personal memories as a confidant of both Miłosz and Brodsky. -- pub. description.

A Part of Speech contains poems from the years 1965-1978, translated by various hands.

Born eighty years ago in Lithuania, Czeslaw Milosz has been acclaimed "one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest" (Joseph Brodsky). This self-described "connoisseur of heavens and abysses" has produced a corpus of poems, essays, memoirs, and fiction of such depth and range that the reader's imagination is moved far beyond ordinary limits of consciousness. In The Poet's Work Leonard Nathan and Arthur Quinn follow Milosz's wanderings in exile from Poland to Paris to Berkeley as they chart the singular development of his art. Relating his life and his works to the unfolding of his thought, they have crafted a lucid reading of Milosz that far surpasses anything yet written on this often enigmatic poet. The Poet's Work is not only a solid introduction to Milosz; it is also a unique record of the poet's own interpretations of his work. As colleagues of Milosz at Berkeley, Nathan and Quinn had long, detailed discussions with the poet. It is this spirit of collaboration that brings a sense of immediacy and authority to their seamless study. Nathan and Quinn reveal as never before why Milosz is a true visionary, a poet of ideas in history. And they show how the influence of Blake, Simone Weil, Dostoevsky, Lev Shestov, and Swedenborg, together with Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, and Robinson Jeffers, has enriched his vision. Milosz's lifelong experience of totalitarian regimes that exalt science and technology over individual needs and aspirations, his acute sense of alienation as an migr , and his humanistic zeal and belief in the primacy of living have brought a prismatic quality to his poetry. At seventy, Milosz spoke of himself as an "ecstatic pessimist." In their sensitive mapping of his art, Nathan and Quinn skillfully demonstrate that Milosz's global influence has been achieved by the ever-shifting balance he strikes between ecstasy and pessimism. Irony and humor are never far from this book, which not only communicates Milosz's polyphonic message but also evokes his uniquely humane sensibility. The Poet's Work is an illuminating introduction to Milosz that will inform and engage scholars and general readers for years to come.

This collection of thirty poems may be compared to the critical essays that have made Venclova famous. Venclova's major poetic accomplishment is his linking of intimate experience and historical incident in poems that are intensely contemporary at the same time as they reach back to the ethnic roots of an entire generation. Diana Senechal's deft translation from the Lithuanian - done in collaboration with the author - preserves both Venclova's lyric voice and the complex stanzaic patterns for which his poetry is known in his native country. Featuring an insightful introduction by the late Joseph Brodsky, and a fascinating exhange between Venclova and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz about the city of their respective youths.

Biography -- Literary Criticism Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) is unquestionably the greatest poet to emerge from postwar Russia and one of the great minds of the last century. After his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1972, Brodsky transformed himself from a stunned and unprepared emigre into, as he himself termed it, "a Russian poet, an English essayist, and, of course, an American citizen." In interviews from 1972 to 1995, Joseph Brodsky: Conversations covers the course of his exile. The last interview dates from just ten weeks before his death. In talks, he calibrates the process of his remarkable reinvention from a brilliant, brash, but decidedly provincial Leningrad poet to an international man of letters and an erudite Nobel Prize laureate. Brodsky's poetry earned him a Nobel, and his essays won him awards and international acclaim. This volume shows that there was a third medium, in addition to poetry and essays, in which Brodsky excelled--the interview. Although he said that "in principle prose is simply spilling some beans, which poetry sort of contains in a tight pod," he nevertheless emerges as an extraordinary and inventive conversationalist. This volume includes not only his notable interviews that helped consolidate Brodsky's international reputation but also early and hard-to-find interviews in journals that have since disappeared. Cynthia L. Haven is a literary critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Cortland Review, and Stanford Magazine. Her work also has been published in Civilization, the Washington Post, and the Georgia Review.

Nobel laureate poet Czeslaw Milosz personal selection of 300 of the world's greatest poems written throughout the ages and around the world.