Bells in Winter by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by the author and Lillian Vallee, 71 pages
In this collection of poems Milosz demonstrates a considerable ambivalence when it comes to words, an awareness that they can be made to conceal as well as reveal.
Hieroglyphs for the eye and ear, amorous rings.
A sound reverberated inward, sculpturing our time,
The flicker, flutter, twitter of our language.
The poet constantly returns to nature, both human and inhuman, observing how things change and fade and pass away
not out of sorrow, but in wonder.
Beneath the poems is the recognition that by the time an experience can be put into words it has already passed, coupled with the conviction that through words an experience can live again.
For me, therefore, everything has a double existence.
Both in time and when time shall be no more.
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