Tender toward innocence, tough-minded when faced with brutality and injustice, Milosz could be at one moment susceptible, at another remorseless. Now he is evoking the dewy eroticism of some adolescent girl haunting the grounds of a Lithuanian manor house, now he is anatomizing the traits of character and misdirected creative gifts that led some of his contemporaries into the Marxist web. From start to finish, merciless analytic power coexisted with...

"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...

From the Publisher: Every great poet lives between two worlds. One of these is the real, tangible world of history, private for some and public for others. The other world is a dense layer of dreams, imagination, fantasms. It sometimes happens-that this second world takes on gigantic proportions, that it becomes inhabited by numerous spirits, that it is haunted by Leo Africanus and other ancient magi.

Presents a collection of essays, articles, and poems from a variety of religious and spiritual traditions, including the writings of Toni Morrison, Wendell Berry, Brett Lott, Czeslaw Milosz, and Alicia Ostriker.