Out of This World

A sequence in memory of Czeslaw Milosz using an adjectival title that offers a variety of suggestion: no longer alive; not of this world, somewhere else; extraordinary.  Each poem in the sequence talks of issues and experiences that in one sense or another are beyond the material world. The dedication confirms Heaney’s admiration of Milosz, an Eastern European poet (1911-2004), Polish speaking, of Lithuanian origin, who lived through successive periods of political turbulence from the Russian Revolution onwards and via Communism, Nazism, The Cold War and Iron Curtain to Polish Independence from the Russian Federation. He was Nobel Prize-Winner for Literature in 1980, twenty years after moving to the USA where he was at once diplomat, scholar, translator and professor […]