Facing the River

In the spring of 1989, exactly fifty years after he last saw - and seemed irrevocably cut-off from - the river valley he grew up in, Czeslaw Milosz was invited to return for a visit. The new government of independent Lithuania welcomed him back to the region of his childhood. Many of the poems in Facing the River record his experiences there. Here, the river of the Issa Valley symbolizes the river of time and also the river of mythology over which one cannot step twice. This is the river Milosz, the 1980 Nobel Laureate for Literature, faces while exploring ancient themes. He reflects upon the nature of imagination, human experience, good and evil, and the wonders of life on earth. A poet of immense moral authority, in these later poems, the poems of old age, of a long look back at the catastrophic upheavals of the twentieth century, Milosz writes with amazing clarity and a precise vision. Despite the preponderance of his themes, he writes with the lightness of touch found only in the great masters. Using his own translations and those of Robert Hass, with whom he has worked closely, this volume achieves the one task that seems necessary and at the same time impossible - to invent a language comprehensible "to both the living and the dead."