Czeslaw Milosz
A California Life
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The first book about the Nobel Laureate's transformative but conflicted time in the Golden State.
"There is much to learn from this book about Miłosz and California, yes, but also about poetry and the world."—Ilya Kaminsky
Czesław Miłosz, one of the greatest poets and thinkers of the past hundred years, is not generally considered a Californian. But the Nobel laureate spent four decades in Berkeley—more time than any other single place he lived—and he wrote many of his most enduring works there. This is the first book to look at his life through a California lens. Filled with original research and written with the grace and liveliness of a novel, it is both an essential volume for his most devoted readers and a perfect introduction for newcomers.
Miłosz was a premier witness to the sweep of the twentieth century, from the bombing of Warsaw in World War II to the student protests of the sixties and the early days of the high-tech boom. He maintained an open-minded but skeptical view of American life, a perspective shadowed by the terrors he experienced in Europe. In the light of recent political instability and environmental catastrophe, his poems and ideas carry extra weight, and they are ripe for a new generation of readers to discover them. This immersive portrait demonstrates what Miłosz learned from the Golden State, and what Californians can learn from him.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"The irony is that the greatest Californian poet... could well be a Pole who wrote a single poem in English," suggests journalist Haven (Evolution of Desire) in this detailed biography of Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004). California was crucial to Miłosz's life and work, Haven argues, and notes that the Polish poet had a complicated relationship with the U.S.: "He longed for America yet loathed it, too." The narrative follows Miłosz as he worked in U.C. Berkeley's Slavic department starting in 1960 and taught Polish literature, during which he found American students "unreliable and undisciplined." Haven also traces the poet's relationship to his home country: when he returned for the first time in 30 years after he won the Nobel Prize in 1980, he had questioned "whether he still had any audience in his native land—after the censorship, after the years in exile—and so the crowds stunned him." Much has been written about the poet, and Haven finds new ways into his life by inserting herself into the narrative—discovering Miłosz's Bells in Winter in a Palo Alto Bookstore, visiting him in his Grizzly Peak home, attending his packed last public reading at Berkeley—and her examinations of the influence of place on his poetry are insightful. Fans of Miłosz's work should give this a look.
