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Second Space

New Poems

By Czeslaw Milosz

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Concerned with questions of aging and mortality, A Second Space furthers 93-year-old Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz’s reputation as “arguably the greatest living poet” (Edward Hirsch, New York Times Book Review).

“Milosz continues exploring his own version of the meditative lyric, refusing to rest on his laurels…. Consequently, he joins the ranks of other great poets of old age, such as Robert Penn Warren and W. B. Yeats himself.”—The New York Times Book Review

A SECOND SPACE

How spacious are the heavenly halls!

Approach them on aerial stairs.

Above white clouds, there are the hanging gardens of paradise.

A soul detaches itself from the body and soars.

It remembers that there is an up and a down.

Have we really lost faith in the second space?

And they’ve dissolved, disappeared, both heaven and hell?

Without unearthly meadows how to meet salvation?

And where will an association of the damned fill its abode?

Let us weep, lament the enormity of the loss.

Let us smear our faces with coal, loosen our hair.

Let us inplore that it be returned to us,

That second space.

ISBN: 9780063395497
Imprint: Ecco
On Sale: Jul 1, 2025
List price: $18.5
No of pages: 112
Trim Size: 1.000 in (w) x 1.000 in (h) x 1.000 in (d)
BISAC 1: POETRY / European / General
BISAC 2: POETRY / Russian & Former Soviet Union
BISAC 3: POETRY / European / Italian
BISAC 4:
BISAC 5:
BISAC 6:

Czeslaw Milosz

Biography

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, DC, 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.

Robert Hass

Biography

Robert Hass was born in San Francisco. His books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema (Ecco, 2010), Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Time and Materials (Ecco, 2008), Sun Under Wood (Ecco, 1996), Human Wishes (1989), Praise (1979), and Field Guide (1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation, including Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer’s Selected Poems (2012) and The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994). His essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984) received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

Concerned with questions of aging and mortality, A Second Space furthers 93-year-old Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz’s reputation as “arguably the greatest living poet” (Edward Hirsch, New York Times Book Review).

“Milosz continues exploring his own version of the meditative lyric, refusing to rest on his laurels…. Consequently, he joins the ranks of other great poets of old age, such as Robert Penn Warren and W. B. Yeats himself.”—The New York Times Book Review

A SECOND SPACE

How spacious are the heavenly halls!

Approach them on aerial stairs.

Above white clouds, there are the hanging gardens of paradise.

A soul detaches itself from the body and soars.

It remembers that there is an up and a down.

Have we really lost faith in the second space?

And they’ve dissolved, disappeared, both heaven and hell?

Without unearthly meadows how to meet salvation?

And where will an association of the damned fill its abode?

Let us weep, lament the enormity of the loss.

Let us smear our faces with coal, loosen our hair.

Let us inplore that it be returned to us,

That second space.

ISBN: 9780063395497
Imprint: Ecco
On Sale: Jul 1, 2025
List price: $18.5
No of pages: 112
Trim Size: 1.000 in (w) x 1.000 in (h) x 1.000 in (d)
BISAC 1: POETRY / European / General
BISAC 2: POETRY / Russian & Former Soviet Union
BISAC 3: POETRY / European / Italian
BISAC 4:
BISAC 5:
BISAC 6:

Czeslaw Milosz

Biography

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, DC, 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.

Robert Hass

Biography

Robert Hass was born in San Francisco. His books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema (Ecco, 2010), Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Time and Materials (Ecco, 2008), Sun Under Wood (Ecco, 1996), Human Wishes (1989), Praise (1979), and Field Guide (1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation, including Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer’s Selected Poems (2012) and The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994). His essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984) received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.