Review by Booklist Review
To an earlier Selected Poems (2006) this volume adds 53 pages of very late work. Like Kurt Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Milosz seems to have become unstuck in time, though not, like Billy, haphazardly. Rather, his memory makes his entire life and all he has learned present to him, to be revolved in the light of whatever wisdom he has acquired. Like the very latest of the Selected Poems, the last poems can be more formally playful than the earlier bulk of his work. Naive rhythms and rhymes inform a tribute to a Polish priest-poet of the eighteenth century prized for mixing rough, vernacular expression and ironic, metaphysical content. The shorter poems, from three to a dozen lines long, are appropriately aphoristic or starkly confessional of spiritual need. The longer ones often muse over how the personal and the historic are inextricable. The paradoxical and prophetic spirit of Blake, whom Milosz conjures by name, hovers over all, and a current of guarded hope for this world and of eternity flows definitely, if quietly, through it.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
