From Publishers Weekly
The title's second space comprises heaven and hell, which have "vanished forever"; without them the blessed cannot "meet salvation" and the damned "find suitable quarters." In mourning, the poet exhorts: "Let us implore that it be returned to us,/ That second space." The Nobel laureate, who died this past summer in Kraków at 93, is preoccupied in this collection with establishing that space through words, but also finds it in carnality and in "the unattainable Now." The opening section of summative short lyrics on themes familiar from late Milosz (memory, salvation, place) is followed by four long poems. "Father Severinus" is an eponymous 11-poem dramatic monologue of a priest (who shares one of the names of medieval philosopher Boethius) in whom there is "only a hope of hope." Next comes "Treatise on Theology" ("A young man couldn't write a treatise like this,/ Though I don't think it is dictated by fear of death"), followed by "Apprentice," a beautiful autobiography in verse (with extensive prose annotations by Milosz) and finally a stunning, short "Orpheus and Eurydice": "His lyre was silent and in his dream he was defenseless./ He knew he must have faith and he could not have faith./ And so he would persist, for a very long time,/ Counting his steps in a half-wakeful torpor." The terrors, torpors and partial redemptions of this collection feel wholly earned.
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*Starred Review* The last collection that the late Nobel laureate himself prepared for publication shows him wrestling with faith and disbelief, sin and redemption, death and immortality. Two of its five parts contain very religiously concerned sequences. In the poems of part 2, "Father Severinus," a priest weighs church history and his own history: "Can I tell them: there is no Hell," he asks, "when they learn on earth what Hell is?" Part 33, in Milosz's own voice, is a "Treatise on Theology" that eventually acknowledges that, although it is his "duty as a poet [to] not flatter popular imaginings," he still desires to keep faith with Our Lady at Fatima and Lourdes. If the tributary sequence to his great forebear and inspiration, Oscar Milosz (1877-1939), seems more secular, yet at its heart are his uncle's poetic anticipation of Einsteinian relativity, which allows for the initial creative act of God, and comparison of his uncle to the great mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. One of the short poems of part 1 expresses what is perhaps the most certain conviction in the book, that "if there is no God," a man is still "not permitted to sadden his brother / By saying that there is no God." This is a great last book.
Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
