Czeslaw Milosz: A California Life (California Lives)

Product Description
The first book about the Nobel Laureate's transformative but conflicted time in the Golden State
Czesław Miłosz, one of the greatest poets and thinkers of the past hundred years, is not generally considered a Californian. But the Nobel laureate spent four decades in Berkeley—more time than any other single place he lived—and he wrote many of his most enduring works there. This is the first book to look at his life through a California lens. Filled with original research and written with the grace and liveliness of a novel, it is both an essential volume for his most devoted readers and a perfect introduction for newcomers.
Miłosz was a premier witness to the sweep of the twentieth century, from the bombing of Warsaw in World War II to the student protests of the sixties and the early days of the high-tech boom. He maintained an open-minded but skeptical view of American life, a perspective shadowed by the terrors he experienced in Europe. In the light of recent political instability and environmental catastrophe, his poems and ideas carry extra weight, and they are ripe for a new generation of readers to discover them. This immersive portrait demonstrates what Miłosz learned from the Golden State, and what Californians can learn from him.
Review
"Haven draws on a compendium of knowledge of her subject, having mused on and written about Miłosz for more than 20 years. [...] Haven lets us into her thought processes, even when she is questioning them, and lovingly recreates conversations—in the relative present, at a café with Robert Hass [...] and in the recent past, at Miłosz’s Grizzly Peak home as the poet drinks bourbon and chats with friends into the wee hours." —Los Angeles Review of Books
"Cynthia Haven's book is delicious. She evokes so much so vividly and so intelligently; for me her pages were a restoration of a richer and less lonely time. And her intuition is right: Czeslaw Milosz and California are indeed a chapter in each other's history." — Leon Wieseltier
"Much has been written about the poet, and Haven finds new ways into his life [...] and her examinations of the influence of place on his poetry are insightful. Fans of Milosz's work should give this a look."—Publishers Weekly
“My father came to Berkeley in 1960, a towering Polish poet who testified to the murderous apocalypse of World War II, the nightmare of Stalinism, and the glow of the human spirit. Far from a monotonous exile, he gradually discovered in California a home for forty years, a vital inspiration, and a new international audience, leading to the Nobel Prize in 1980. Cynthia Haven tells this complex story from a deep and moving California perspective. Entrancing.” —Anthony Miłosz, executor of the Miłosz Estate
“
Czesław Miłosz: A California Life asks about the meaning of exile, about the possibilities of a new home, about the transformation of a poetic perspective, about alienation and the building of literary bridges. But in the end, the book asks one big, nearly impossible question: How did the great Polish exile Miłosz change his newfound home—and how did California, after so many years, transform Miłosz’s own metaphysics? For it is a metaphysical question, after all: How does a place change the poet, and what does a poet do to shift our perspective on the place? On this unending journey, Cynthia L. Haven is an illuminating guide, one who brings knowledge, precision, and grace. There is much to learn from this book about Miłosz and California, yes, but also about poetry and the world.” —
Ilya Kaminsky, author of
Deaf Republic
“Mining the largely untapped vein of Miłosz and California, Cynthia Haven has struck paydirt, a goldmine of perception and insight.” —
Richard Lourie, author of
The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin
About the Author
Cynthia L. Haven is a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar and author of 2018’s
Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, the first-eve