A Book of Luminous Things: International Poetry Anthology by Czeslaw Milosz (1996) - Perfect for Poetry Lovers & Book Club Discussions

In this 1996 anthology of international poetry, Milosz presents us with what he calls “short, clear, readable and, to use a compromised term, realist, that is, loyal to reality and attempting to describe it as concisely as possible.” (p. xv) He presents this anthology as his effort to manage what he sees as the estate of poetry, free from attachment to any one country, school of poetry, or century. Milosz asserts this as something critical that needs to be recognized about poems, from whatever country, in whatever era. In this volume, he presents more than 300 poems worthy of the appellation luminous things. Milosz arranged the poems into ten sections, each containing a healthy explanation for the catalog. Here are my abstracts of each section:• Epiphany: an unveiling of reality; an intuitive search for a deeper more essential meaning of a thing.• The Secret of a Thing: showing how difficult it is for the poet to take him/herself outside of the poem in order to present an object as itself.• Travel: expressing the elementary human need to break out of the confines of what is known to find wonder in the unexplored• Places: the characteristic of strangeness found in places that are temporary homes, but not home.• The Moment: how fragile the present moment, like a photograph, what was but not what is.• People Amongst People: the human predilection to see, interpret, judge, and feel the events in our world; the basic emotions of love, hate, fear, admiration, loathing.• Woman’s Skin: on how women describe themselves.• Situations: the many colored tapestry of diversity and multi-cultural aspects of life, history, time and place.• Non-Attachment: to mull over the role of the self as active or contemplative. History: the commitment to the political aspect of life and changes the 20th Century has had on poetry. Another observation was the marked affinity for Chinese poets in this anthology. Many more entries are given to Chu-I Po, Fu Tu, and Wei Wang than to any other individual poet. I believe this is a reflection of what Milosz sees as the goal of this anthology, as noted at the beginning of this paragraph. He acknowledges this partiality, explaining “What attracts me to Chinese poets most is their ability to draw with a few dashes a certain situation.” (p.148) What struck me most was the intense, personal attachment Milosz demonstrated for these chosen poems. Almost every poem is graced with a short introduction by Milosz, reading like conversational commentary on why the poem was chosen, what to look for in the poem, or his personal attraction to the poem. These introductions gave me the feeling that I was meeting someone’s best friends. This made the book most accessible. I sat in my favorite chair as I reached for the book, curled up under a wool shawl, ready and open to meet new, old friends.The inclusion of this anthology broadened my world of poets. Many of the poets were unknown to me. Milosz seemed to almost deliberately exclude the major poets that would be expected in such a volume. I actually found this to be a way for me to get off of the beaten path and wander country roads and towering hi-rises that were delightful in their newness, filled with wonder and surprise. I came away from reading this with a sense of the world as a larger place than live in, yet of being a part of this universal world. I was given glimpses of the timelessness of poetry, the history of this art. These readings both expanded and contracted the universe, for me. And I came away from all this reading with two somewhat contradictory thoughts: the universe is so much wider than our own view of it, and, we all walk in the same river, but different.A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry