An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804011338 ISBN 13: 9780804011334

Publisher: Swallow Press, 2011

Synopsis

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) often seemed austere and forbidding to Americans, but those who got to know him found him warm, witty, and endlessly enriching. An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz presents a collection of remembrances from his colleagues, his students, and his fellow writers and poets in America and Poland.Milosz\u2019s oeuvre is complex, rooted in twentieth-century eastern European history. A poet, translator, and prose writer, Milosz was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1961 to 1998. In 1980 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.The earliest in this collection of thirty-two memoirs begins in the 1930s, and the latest takes readers to within a few days of Milosz\u2019s death. This vital collection reveals the fascinating life story of the man Joseph Brodsky called \u201cone of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest.\u201d

About this title

Review:

“In the wake of his death in 2004, the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz seems more permanent than ever. Yet the creator of that poetry—the human being who spent much of his life wrestling with loneliness, obscurity, and a punishing form of linguistic exile—has already begun to recede into literary history. We should be grateful, then, for the reminiscences that Cynthia Haven has collected in An Invisible Rope. The reader is offered glimpses of Milosz in his salad days and in his post-Nobel splendor, in Wilno and Berkeley, Washington and Krakow. The result is a vivid, kaleidoscopic portrait of the man whom Adam Zagajewski calls ‘an ecstatic poet and ecstatic person.’” 

—James Marcus, author of Amazonia and Deputy Editor, Harper’s Magazine 

 “These vivid portraits and memoirs, these intimacies rescued from oblivion, tie us more closely to one of the great poets and spiritual presences of the 20th century. An Invisible Rope is an indispensable compendium.”

  —Edward Hirsch, author of The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems

From the Author:

Cynthia L. Haven has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Kenyon Review, the Georgia Review, and others. Her most recent books include Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations and Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven. She was recently a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with Vienna’s Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen.

About this edition

• Publisher: Swallow Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0804011338
• ISBN 13: 9780804011334
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Haven Cynthia L.