MILOSZ AND WORLD POETRY
Robert Faggen:
Seamus Heaney's
writing combines lyricism and vision. He
transports us from the deep earth of the past to the ethical conunitments of
love and need in the present and the future. His most recent collections of
poems include
The Spirit Level,
and his essays include the collection,
The
Government
if
the Tongue,
and his Nobel Prize lecture,
Crediting Poetry.
Edward
Hirsch
is the author of several volumes of poetry, including
Earthly Measures,
The
Night Parade,
and
Wild Gratitude.
His work describes the plight of the
modern Orpheus, awakening to the depths of his own voice.
Tomas
Venclova,
Lithuanian-born poet, essayist, scholar, translator, and critic, most
recently wrote a biography of poet Aleksander Wat and a collection of poems
entitled
Winter Dialogue.
In the words of the late Joseph Brodsky, "Venclova's
song starts at the point where the voice usually breaks, at the end of exhala–
tion, when all inner voices are used up." And he added, "Whether his
language is called Lithuanian or universal is irrelevant. For Tomas Venclova
the two categories are one and the same."
Adam Zagaj ewski
lives in Paris
and teaches part of the year at the University of Houston. One of Poland's
most distinguished poets and essayists, he is, according to Edward Hirsch, "a
poet of profound dualisms," and of a powerful dialectic between poetry and
imagination, history and philosophy, the temporal and the eternal. His most
recent collection of poems is entitled
MysticismJar Beginners.
He has also pub–
lished numerous essays, including the collection
Tillo Cities.
Seamus Heaney.
Seamus Heaney:
Thank you. The alphabet in general has been kind to
poets filed under H. Hesiod, Homer, Horace, Herberts of various sorts,
Hardy, Heine, Hopkins, Hass, Hirsch. I'm not complaining about being an
H, but the luck of the draw did place me first, and that creates a certain
anxiety. But it also gladdens me to be the one who starts the celebration.
This is a moment of
sursum corda
and of
gmfias a<f?illlus tibi, Czeslaw!
In Ireland, you still hear nostalgic talk about the Celts and their various
European haunts and homelands, far away and long ago by the Danube; or
closer and more recently, in Caesar's Gaul, in the Rhone valley; or at the
northern limit of Roman Britain, among the conscripted legions stationed
on Hadrian's Wall. A few years ago, for example, I myself felt far away and
long ago when I stood in the rushy corner of a field beside the old Roman
camp on Hadrian's Wall at Bird Oswald in Northumberland. This scraggy
patch of wetland brought me back to all the old damp nowheres I had known
on the farm where I grew up, places bathed from the start in what William
Wordsworth once called a "visionary dreariness," lonely sites where I had
definite experience but never quite knew what it meant. And then near Bird
Oswald one meaning was revealed. The guidebook told me I was standing on
ground sacred to the Romano-Celtic goddess Coventina, she who is repre–
sented over and over again on the many votive panels and little altars found
