Facing the River

Book excerpt: Milosz's poems move forward while attending to his past, and deal with how his Lithuania, and Europe at large, maintain their habit of partial memory and forgetting. In these poems, such as the sequence Lithuania. After Fifty-Two Years, Wanda (about the painter Wanda Telakowska), Sarajevo, Translating Anna Swir on an Island in the Caribbean, visible worlds exist and sensations of body and soul exist in memory, a living resource and not a nostalgia. Milosz remains aware of suffering but aware too, of the poet's duty to celebrate. Facing the River does not have the tone of finality, but of a restless seeking which finds.