Luminous Things: On Czeslaw Milosz

I know a lot of poets admire Czeslaw Milosz’s anthology, A Book of Luminous Things. I’ve had it for more than twenty years, but never did more than dip into it. I recently decided to give it a close read (taking nearly four months, savoring just one to three poems per day), and I’m sorry to say it slightly disappointed me, maybe because I hoped for more. I read anthologies to focus on a subject sometimes, or at least to discover poems and poets that are new to me. But with this anthology I found almost no poems that I would call favourite discoveries, or anything new that I fell in love with (in contrast to several more recent anthologies by James Crews and John Brehm). Whatever favourites occurred in Milosz’s book, well, I already knew them, and their being grouped into themes didn’t do enough that was fresh for me. Maybe I should have read this twenty years ago?

At any rate, practically nothing newly exciting or stimulating for me here. Milosz’s erudition is evident and the breadth of his reading is tremendous, but too many poems just fell flat for me, although the Chinese and Japanese selections tended to be more rewarding to revisit (mostly known), as did a few of the Eastern European poems (some not known, although I’d already read a lot of Swir). One Stafford poem and occasional Levertov, Rexroth, and Rumi poems seemed new to me, that I liked.

But mostly I disliked Milosz’s prose introductions to many of the poems. The English seemed stilted and unsmooth, or needlessly complex or convoluted in grammar, even awkward. It wasn’t what he was saying that bothered me (nothing was “unnecessary”), but how he was saying it. Kind of surprising when he says (on page 161) that “my ideal is simplicity.” But more than that, his poetry tastes often didn’t match mine, or didn’t enlarge mine, and I’m not fond of his prose writing style (although the section introductions were better).

What are your thoughts on A Book of Luminous Things, if you’ve read it?

Among the many lively responses on Facebook, James Crews said, “Thank you for the shout-out, Michael. Milosz’s anthology was seminal for its time, but you touch on something that I find in many anthologies: they mostly choose to share well-known favorites. I love anthologies that feature poems by people writing today, or very recently, with fresh takes on daily life right now.”

A few weeks after posting my thoughts on the Milosz book, it occurred to me that perhaps I was a little hard on it, as it really is a seminal anthology, well worth reading to discover new poems and to revisit poems you might know very well. The luminous we find in life, and poetry, is what makes life worth living, and this book celebrates those blessings.