Czeslaw Milosz Books

So far Unattainable Earth has been awesome. No, I haven't finished the book, but I've read enough to get a biased opinion about it. I'm determined to finish it because I like it a lot. The author put together different poems together from his and other authors' works. The poems are very well expressed, and showed many emotions. One thing that I liked the best was the fact that the author explained how you can never fully express yourself in poetry or anything else because we just don't have words for some things (p. 40). For me, I have a deep sense of love and hate that just can't be put into words. I do my best to write it in poetry, but it never works. I only know what I feel while the reader of my poetry gets just a glimpse of my true feelings. The poems written in Unattainable Earth are very descriptive and metaphoric. They don't all rhyme, but free verse is my favorite type of poetry. "Paradise"(p. 5-6) and "The Boy"(p. 52) have to be my favorite poems so far. I interpreted "Paradise" as being a poem of questioning and confusion. In seems that the author trys to describe paradise, but what is described isn't paradise at all. I love questioning deep subjects as paradise, love, and life. What are the real definitions of these words? I still have yet to learn because no one has been able to tell me. "The Boy" seems to be more lonely. I get the feeling of separation when I read it. I see the whole poem as a metaphor. It just shows how imperfect us humans are. The "gypsy girl" points out all these things we have in our lives. When you look up close you see an innocent boy, but when you look at the whole scheme you notice all the imperfections and you notice how you are like that boy. I gave this book a four-star rating because it is an awesome book. The only problem I had reading it was that when the book went from to inscript to poem to inscript I got confused. I got the mind set of reading poems, so I tried to read the inscript with a rhythm, and it didn't work to well. I love the book and I would reccomend anyone with a open mind to read it.

So far Unattainable Earth has been awesome. No, I haven't finished the book, but I've read enough to get a biased opinion about it. I'm determined to finish it because I like it a lot. The author put together different poems together from his and other authors' works. The poems are very well expressed, and showed many emotions. One thing that I liked the best was the fact that the author explained how you can never fully express yourself in poetry or anything else because we just don't have words for some things (p. 40). For me, I have a deep sense of love and hate that just can't be put into words. I do my best to write it in poetry, but it never works. I only know what I feel while the reader of my poetry gets just a glimpse of my true feelings. The poems written in Unattainable Earth are very descriptive and metaphoric. They don't all rhyme, but free verse is my favorite type of poetry. "Paradise"(p. 5-6) and "The Boy"(p. 52) have to be my favorite poems so far. I interpreted "Paradise" as being a poem of questioning and confusion. In seems that the author trys to describe paradise, but what is described isn't paradise at all. I love questioning deep subjects as paradise, love, and life. What are the real definitions of these words? I still have yet to learn because no one has been able to tell me. "The Boy" seems to be more lonely. I get the feeling of separation when I read it. I see the whole poem as a metaphor. It just shows how imperfect us humans are. The "gypsy girl" points out all these things we have in our lives. When you look up close you see an innocent boy, but when you look at the whole scheme you notice all the imperfections and you notice how you are like that boy. I gave this book a four-star rating because it is an awesome book. The only problem I had reading it was that when the book went from to inscript to poem to inscript I got confused. I got the mind set of reading poems, so I tried to read the inscript with a rhythm, and it didn't work to well. I love the book and I would reccomend anyone with a open mind to read it.

I bought this book in 1990, and it's travelled with me everywhere I've been since then. Not that I'm constantly reading it -- as a matter of fact, I think I last opened it a year ago -- rather, I think of it as a medicine cabinet of little insights and stories: wisdom in distilled, titrated doses, a portable collection of innoculations against quotidian ennui, antidotes for social blindness. It's hardly Milosz's best book; but it represents something of an apotheosis of the personal literary journal, and as such it's a good reference or example to have on hand. I sincerely recommend it.

This volume consists of about a decade's worth of correspondence (1959-68) between the sometimes sagacious Trappist monk Thomas Merton and the Lithuanian-born Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, later to become a Nobel laureate for Literature. Milosz was residing in Paris when the correspondence began, but he soon moved to Berkeley, California, to teach at the university. Merton was writing from Gethsemani, Kentucky, apart from one or two notes from his travel in 1968.

These are two alert minds, discussing everything from Communism to segregation, Catholicism to television, campus unrest to poetry. We see in Milosz a salubrious skepticism toward some of Merton's progressive enthusiasms, and even a sharp critique of those who would equate the flaws of American capitalism with the grave sins of Stalinism (Milosz uses the word "injustice" rather pointedly). During campus unrest at Berkeley, Milosz notes that the More Compassionate Than Thou seem to have compassion for everyone but "squares." Milosz is neither pacifist nor anarch, and in one or two instances provides a valuable counterpoint to Merton's views -- particularly on communism, which Milosz saw up close.

Interesting, to see the views of both men concur about the liturgical changes in the Catholic Church (not much enthusiasm for them); about confession, Milosz explains some "problems" he has had, and Merton gives us his views on what occurs during the Sacrament. There is much about poetry -- one or two poems by each author are included -- and about a magazine which Merton edited in his final days, "Monks Pond."

Mertonians will enjoy this volume, and even persons such as this reviewer, whose respect for Merton is not to be confused with discipleship or idolatry. Milosz has a sharp mind, able to discourse with breathtaking ease about Marx, Hegel, and the heresy of Socinianism (?!) -- about the plight of four Polish writers nicknamed Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta -- about the spirit of the Sixties & some of its less palatable side effects. I was inspired by "Striving Towards Being" to explore the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, and was not disappointed.

Czeslaw Miloscz and Thomas Merton have always been two of my favorite writers; until this book I had not known they were friends. This book celebrates that rare thing I remember from youth: a friendship of ideas between kindred spirits. These letters were written at the beginning of the 1960's -- a rare moment of cultural clarity on both sides of the "iron curtain." Forty years later, with the triumph of capitalism and our so-called "individualism" all but assured, with religious questions making the daily news, it is a good thing to step back and view the world's conversation as it was beginning, when there were two poets for whom ideas and ethics were living and breathing and more exciting than money. God, freedom, community -- they're all here as well as prophetic looks at mass media, individualism and other buzz words. Milosz and Merton really make them buzz. Read this.

I'm a native Pole, so it's easy for me to say "Milosz is great". I can read his works in the original language he has written them in, however, as person who uses the English language on the daily basis, I can also say "He is the poet of the world". In this book, Milosz shows his talent at its best. Descriptive, enigmatic and feeling. Thank you for that, Czeslaw,this books expressed your feelings so eloquently that it helped me express mine.

I must agree with a recent TLS review.which wonders why the U of Chicago ever published this book. IT IS NOT WORTH PURCHASING.

n the forward to this book by the late, great poet Czeslaw Milosz, he writes "There is a mysterious connection between the human organism and some spiritual energies, thanks to which science alone cannot answer many of our questions about ourselves. So perhaps [Dr. Szczeklik]is right to use the word katharsis, or purification, and go back to ancient Greek drama . . . This way of referring back to the ancient world makes us think of the age-old continuity of the medical profession, which quite possibly derives its high standing from its permanent place on the border between life and death." As one might expect of a poet, that pretty much says it all. One of America's most prominent doctors strongly recommended this book to me; the doctor's wife is a well-known humanities scholar, so when he told me that this book is a deeply cultured reflection on the mysteries that a doctor confronts in his career I was eager to read the book. I've read it twice now, and I must say that the first time I was a little disappointed. Yes, it is an elegant, interesting, gracefully written meditation on the mysteries of life and death, the blankness of suffering and extinction and the human desire to envelop those experiences with meaning and morality. But it is not some kind of intellectually persuasive argument that takes one through a chain of unbroken logic. Thinking about the book and my reaction, I realised that the answer probably lies with Polanyi's concept of "tacit knowledge". Polanyi demonstrates that most of what we know we would struggle to communicate intellectually, from something as simple as a tennis swing to our judgments about the most difficult and stressful situations. The real value of this book, I have realised, is that Dr. Szezeklik, after a lifetime of healing and failing to heal, of saving lives and witnessing death, still believes in the spiritual and intellectual and emotional connections with illness and death, and he sincerely believes in the transcendent meaning of what we experience in life. This must have been what impressed the American doctor who told me about the book. CATHARSIS is not some kind of logical juggernaut--it is an elegant and cultured report back from the mysterious ground between life and death.

A review by Irene Smereck
I found Catharsis: On the Art of Medicine to be a very interesting, informative, and readable book on a subject, medicine, which is sometimes difficult for the ordinary reader. It offers many nuances not often covered in medical or general information. I am purchasing this book for my daughter, an E. R. physician. From conversations with her, I have seen that diagnosis is a very intuitive, almost magical art. Andrzej Szczeklik's book adds the weight of historical evidence to her personal anecdotes, helping me to see her, and all physicians, in a new light.

Most entries in this alphabetized soup of cultural what's what and who's who are devoted to fellow Lithuanians and Poles--names that will be obscure to most readers. However, there are some exceptions. The late poet, Joseph Brodsky, merits his first admirable mention on page 8 when Milosz mentions Brodsky's resignation from the Academy of Arts & Letters. (He is mentioned again on pages 136 and 247). Did you know that Dosteovsky hated London, "the capital city of capitalism?" Milosz held major antipathy toward Simone de Beavoir--the woman and her writing. "I could not forgive her and Sartre their baseness in their joint attack on Camus" (apparently Camus was a lone ally of his at Gallimand Publishing). He's right on the money as he coins Berkeley's "anticonformists" in his "'Blasphemy" entry: "I became sufficiently acquainted with the herd thinking of leftists and its fruit in the form of political correctness." There are cruel, uncalled-for comments on Polish writer Maria Dabrowska. The first negative mention of writer Witold Gombrowicz is on page 22 when he declared that French is a superior language to Polish language; on page 215 Milosz even calls Gombrowica a "demon." Then I learned that Wilno was an important center of Jewish culture "...on a world scale." Milosz unwittingly writes a paen to Wilno in the Witold Hulewicz entry. Noticeably absent from the ABC's is the late writer Jerzy Kosinski who only earns a snide aside early on in the text. Milosz burns Arthur Koestler, albeit in a 5-page entry (one of the longest in the book); he burns him by basically saying that he suffers from Small Man Syndrome. Admiring words describe Polish Studies professor Manfred Kridl (you MUST read what happened to Kridl when appointed to Columbia University on p. 177). Milosz is complimentary to the works and personhood of poet/writer Denise Levertov. And the yukky Henry Miller? Milosz declares "If there were no Miller, there would probably be no Allen Ginsberg" (okay, I'll take my chances). He proposes that Darwin borrowed some philosophy from Schopenhauer. And did you know that American writer Jack London held socialist views? And was widely translated in Russian? My two fave entries in ABC's are "Obligations" and "Stupidity of the West." Within the former are his strident feelings about base Polish culture: he hates the peasant dances and he gets tired of Chopin getting drug out for every occasion. In the latter (Stupidity), he laments the lack of imagination in the West "...that Los Angelos should not even exist...it horrifies me." The Yalta tragedy comes up as does 1992 Bosnis with the West ignoring THAT holocaust. Apparently Carl Jung was skeptical of the Western mind's ability to grasp Eastern spirituality...and that's it folks. A few of the things I learned in Milosz's ABC's!

Autobiography in alphabetical form: the author remembers the friends (mostly) and the foes he met, and the places he lived in or visited during his long life.
I feel that this book is more written for the people he met themselves, or for their friends and descendants, rather than for outsiders like me, who don't know 80 to 90 % of the subjects or items treated; although some comments on, for instance, Amalrik, Henry Miller, Schopenhauer or Walt Whitman are worth-while reading.
On the other hand, some very well known names, like Witold Gombrowicz, are left out.
There is one big thread in the lives of all these commemorated people: war and revolution.
Only for insiders.

Many of the stories in this collection have interesting concepts behind them. However, most, if not all of them, suffer from Wat's rambling style. At many points in his stories, his style seems overwrought, and it simply serves to obscure the meaning (not in that possitive "Faulkner" way). The pick of the litter here is the story of the isle of Kings. In it, Wat seems to state that a society cannot exist in a vacuum. In order for it to grow, it must come into contact with other societies (cultures). Thus, man left to his own devices eventually devolves into a barbarianism. Many of the other stories have good ideas behind them (like this one). However, I found this collection, and it's author's style cumbersome, and unenjoyable. I would recomend it only if you are either previously interested in Wat, or if you're deeply (and I do mean deeply) interested in European existentialism.