Ironically, Miłosz’ own poetry was banned in his homeland even later than 1980 when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. After that, he complained to Madeline Levine that “he was writing into a vacuum.” As the poet-professor-translator recalled in her essay, “I Promised to Speak My Mind,” Miłosz told her, “Since he’d won the Nobel… almost no one would tell him that something he wrote wasn’t good enough,” so he made her promise she would always speak her mind.

Miłosz certainly spoke his! Upon his first meeting with Harvard Professor and well-known poetry critic Helen Vendler, Miłosz reportedly exclaimed “with acerbic disapproval, ‘Ah, the pope of poetry’.” In her essay, “Pretending to Be a Real Person,” Vendler admitted being “pained” when “merely doing my best to spread the word about contemporary poets whose writing, to my mind, deserved recognition.” And, “So I attended the rest of Miłosz’s intensely felt lectures, regretting our distance from each other but exhilarated by the immersion in his mind.”

In this collection of well-chosen essays that can only be touched on here, the editor gives a rounded view of the work Czesław Miłosz did and the ongoing need he felt for connections.

Somehow writer Judith Tannenbaum convinced Miłosz to immerse himself in teaching poetry to maximum security inmates in San Quentin. In “Miłosz at San Quentin,” Tannenbaum explained, “I introduced his work to my students soon after I began teaching at the prison. I told them that Miłosz had been born to the Polish-speaking class in Lithuania in 1911 and that he had lived through much of the horror that the twentieth century had to offer. He lived through World War II in Nazi-occupied Warsaw; he first served, then broke with, Communist Poland; he spent most of his life in exile.” Using this dispossession of home to establish a connection with the prison inmates, Tannenbaum “talked of how Miłosz’s poems conveyed both the cruelty he had witnessed and the joy of being a creature with consciousness, alive on this planet, able to witness. I let my students know I loved the poems’ ability to express the limitations of being human, while always remaining on the side of the human.”

When both of his wives preceded him in death, the human side poured into his poem “Orpheus and Eurydice,” for his beloved Carol, which began, “Only her love had warmed him, humanized him. / When he was with her, he thought differently about himself. / He could not fail her now, when she was dead.” After quoting those lines in the essay “On the Border of This World and the Beyond…,” author Joanna Zach commented that Miłosz “made me feel that what people say to each other is always important, irrespective of the subject matter, because, by merely using words, they contribute either to clarity and order or to chaos.”

Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney added his insights to Miłosz’s pursuit of clarity in the essay “In Gratitude for All the Gifts,” saying “His (Miłosz’s) yearning for a more encompassing form of expression than is humanly available was a theme to which he returned again and again…. Yet he also exulted in the certainty that he was called as a poet ‘to glorify things just because they are,’ and he maintained that ‘the ideal life for a poet is to contemplate the word “is”.’”

Reflecting a similar thought in the essay “Missing Miłosz,” Professor Natalie Gerber quoted a line from Miłosz’s poem “Ars Poetica” in which he wrote, “how difficult it is to remain just one person.” To that thought of the changing form of is-ness, Gerber wrote, “and that challenges us not to take refuge in private fancies, as romantic poetry does, but to participate in and be answerable to history in one’s own voice.”

Finding a voice for one’s is-ness often begins the life of poetry-writing. In “Interviews with Robert Hass,” the Pulitzer prize-winning poet described a place where poets and angels tread. “You know, to write a book of poems is to wrestle with an angel, and the first part of the task is to figure out what angel you are wrestling.” Hass added, “you scratch in the sand for a while, writing out of your obsessions. And after a while, you figure out what it is you are doing or need to do.”

Miłosz keenly felt this connection among peoples of all kinds and, during the many years his work was banned in his own country, the hope of a connection with readers he could not see nor even know at the time if they existed.

In this collection of well-chosen essays that can only be touched on here, the editor gives a rounded view of the work Czesław Miłosz did and the ongoing need he felt for connections. Caught in political battles, spiritual struggles, cultural conflicts, language changes, the traumatic loss of two wives, and the physical estrangement of exile from his homeland until he could finally move back to Poland in 2000, Miłosz experienced various degrees of isolation throughout his long life.

An Invisible Rope comes to us from Ohio University Press in 2011, the 100th anniversary of Czesław Miłosz’s birth. Somewhat akin to an umbilical cord for poets and poetry, that rope invisibly connects poets of the past to poets today and onward toward a literary future. Miłosz keenly felt this connection among peoples of all kinds and, during the many years his work was banned in his own country, the hope of a connection with readers he could not see nor even know at the time if they existed.

The rope uncoils, too, from “A Magic Mountain,” a poem by Miłosz which Robert Hass quoted in the final chapter: “I fashioned an invisible rope / And I climbed it and it held me.” As Hass explained, Miłosz “had to invent the idea that there was still somebody to read his poems.”

For years, he had no way of knowing if anyone in Poland read his poetry or not. After reading this book, however, poets and poetry lovers will most likely want to read not only the Nobel-winning poetry of this noble poet but the Polish poets whose work Czesław Miłosz translated into English for the love of poetry and its ability to connect peoples around the globe and across the ages.