• This paperback edition includes forty late poems, translated by the author's son Anthony Milosz, and an Introduction by Seamus Heaney.

2011 is the centenary year of one of the twentieth century’s most important poets, Nobel Laureate Czelaw Milosz. To mark the occasion, Anthony Milosz has translated into English the late poems of his father, offering readers new insight into the work of an unparalleled master of the form. These poems are now included in this updated, long-awaited paperback edition of Selected Poems.

A virtuoso of expression and probing inquiry, Milosz was shaped by the conflicting forces of life in northeastern Europe—a crossroads of civilizations, languages and ideas where old folk traditions met Catholic, Protestant, Judaic, and Orthodox rites. Born in 1911, Milosz witnessed a century of catastrophe and madness—two world wars, revolutions, invasions, and the murder of tens of millions—set to a cacophony of hymns, gunfire, national anthems, and dazzling lies. In the thick of this upheaval, wide awake and in awe of living, dodging shrapnel, imprisonment, and despair, Milosz tried to understand both history and the moment, with humble respect for the suffering of each individual.

Milosz’s masterful poetry is 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.” Unflinching, outspoken, timeless, and unsentimental, his work digs through the rubble of the past, forging a vision—and a warning—that encompasses both pain and joy. “His intellectual life,” writes Seamus Heaney “could be viewed as a long single combat with shape-shifting untruth.”