An Invisible Rope

Book excerpt: A Publishers Weekly Top Ten ?Literary Essays” Title, Spring 2011. Czeslaw Milosz (1911?2004) often seemed austere and forbidding to Americans, but those who got to know him found him warm, witty, and endlessly enriching. An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz presents a collection of remembrances from his colleagues, his students, and his fellow writers and poets in America and Poland. The earliest in this collection of thirty-two memoirs begins in the 1930s, and the latest takes readers to within a few days of Milosz's death. This vital collection reveals the fascinating life story of the man Joseph Brodsky called ?one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest.”