Second Space: New Poems - Paperback

by Czeslaw Milosz (Author)

Concerned with questions of aging and mortality, A Second Space furthers 93-year-old Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz's reputation as "arguably the greatest living poet" (Edward Hirsch, New York Times Book Review).

"Milosz continues exploring his own version of the meditative lyric, refusing to rest on his laurels.... Consequently, he joins the ranks of other great poets of old age, such as Robert Penn Warren and W. B. Yeats himself."--The New York Times Book Review

A SECOND SPACE

How spacious are the heavenly halls!

Approach them on aerial stairs.

Above white clouds, there are the hanging gardens of paradise.

A soul detaches itself from the body and soars.

It remembers that there is an up and a down.

Have we really lost faith in the second space?

And they've dissolved, disappeared, both heaven and hell?

Without unearthly meadows how to meet salvation?

And where will an association of the damned fill its abode?

Let us weep, lament the enormity of the loss.

Let us smear our faces with coal, loosen our hair.

Let us inplore that it be returned to us,

That second space.

Back Jacket

Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz's most recent collection Second Space marks a new stage in one of the great poetic pilgrimages of our time. Few poets have inhabited the land of old age as long or energetically as Milosz, for whom this territory holds both openings and closings, affirmations as well as losses. "Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, / I felt a door opening in me and I entered / the clarity of early morning," he writes in "Late Ripeness." Elsewhere he laments the loss of his voracious vision -- "My wondrously quick eyes, you saw many things, / Lands and cities, islands and oceans" -- only to discover a new light that defies the limits of physical sight: "Without eyes, my gaze is fixed on one bright point, / That grows large and takes me in."

Second Space is typically capacious in the range of voices, forms, and subjects it embraces. It moves seamlessly from dramatic monologues to theological treatises, from philosophy and history to epigrams, elegies, and metaphysical meditations. It is unified by Milosz's ongoing quest to find the bond linking the things of this world with the order of a "second space," shaped not by necessity, but grace. Second Space invites us to accompany a self-proclaimed "apprentice" on this extraordinary quest. In "Treatise on Theology," Milosz calls himself "a one day's master." He is, of course, far more than this. Second Space reveals an artist peerless both in his capacity to confront the world's suffering and in his eagerness to embrace its joys: "Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds. / Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice! / How will I live without you, my consoling one! / But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees, / And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth."