Provinces - Hardcover

Milosz, Czeslaw; Hass, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0880013176 ISBN 13: 9780880013178

Publisher: Ecco, 1991

Synopsis

Poems explore the themes of youth and mortality, the redemptive power of language, and the borders that divide the past and the present

About this title

About the Author:

Czeslaw Milosz was born in Szetejnie, Lithuania, in 1911. He worked with the Polish resistance movement in Warsaw during World War II and was later stationed in Paris and Washington, D.C., as a Polish cultural attaché. He defected to France in 1951, and in 1960 he accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, and was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He died in 2004.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Blacksmith Shop

I liked the bellows operated by rope.
A hand or foot pedal--I don't remember which.
But that blowing, and the blazing of the fire!
And a piece of iron in the fire, held there by tongs,
Red, softened for the anvil,
Beaten with a hammer, bent into a horseshoe,
Thrown in a bucket of water, sizzle, steam.

And horses hitched to be shod,
Tossing their manes; and in the grass by the river
Plowshares, sledge runners, harrows waiting for repair

At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor,
Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds.
I stare and stare.
It seems I was called for this:
To glorify things just because they are.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0880013176
• ISBN 13: 9780880013178
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80