Facing The River

Czeslaw Milosz never expected to see the river valley of his childhood again. In the spring of 1989, exactly fifty years after he left, the newly independent government of Lithuania invited him back to that magical region where he grew up.

Many of the poems in Facing the River record what he found there. The river of the Issa Valley stands for the river of time and for the river of mythology, the one in which a person cannot step twice. Milosz faces this river as he takes up ancient themes: the nature of imagination, human experience, and good and evil, along with a celebration of the wonders of life on earth.

These are poems of his later years, written by a Nobel laureate looking back over the catastrophic upheavals of the twentieth century. Despite the seriousness of his subjects, he writes with the light touch of a great master.