Poems from the Abyss
Poems from the Abyss Charles Simic November 23, 2017 Issue Miłosz: A Biography by Andrzej Franaszek, edited and translated from the Polish by Aleksandra and Michael Parker Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 526 pp., $35.00 Dominique Nabokov Czesław Miłosz, New York City, 1986 One of the finest poems by Czesław Miłosz is the four-part sequence A Treatise on Poetry , a kind of elegy for pre-war Poland, which he wrote in France in the mid-1950s. Its first part, “Beautiful Times,” describes the glamorous society life in Kraków before World War I, and concludes with these lines: “The laughter in cafes/Echoes about a hero’s grave”; its second part, “The Capital,” ends with this little scene in Warsaw the night before the German invasion on September 1, 1939: On Tamka Stree