An Invisible Rope ─ Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz

"These vivid portraits and memoirs, these intimacies rescued from oblivion, tie us more closely to one of the great poets and spiritual presences of the twentieth century. An Invisible Rope is an indispensable compendium."---Edward Hirsch, author of The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems

"In the wake of his death in 2004, the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz seems more permanent than ever. Yet the creator of that poetry---the human being who spent much of his life wrestling with loneliness, obscurity, and a punishing form of linguistic exile---has already begun to recede into literary history. We should be grateful, then, for the reminiscences that Cynthia Haven has collected in An Invisible Rope. The reader is offered glimpses of Milosz in his salad days and in his post-Nobel splendor, in Wilno and Berkeley, Washington and Krakow. The result is a vivid, kaleidoscopic portrait of the man whom Adam Zagajewski calls `an ecstatic poet and ecstatic person.'"---James Marcus, author of Amazonia and deputy editor, Harper's Magazine

"The image emerging from this invaluable collection is the authentic Czeslaw Milosz, the poet who rejected theodicy but kept faith. To know him was to enter a force field in which the past century's struggle with evil could be palpably felt; it meant also to be swept up by the intensity with which he, a witness to his century's horrors, lived and worked. Those who have been touched by his poetry will be moved by these recollections, all of them animated by his love of life and vibrating with his voice."---Gregory Freidin, author of A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation

Cynthia L. Haven has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Kenyon Review, the Georgia Review, and other publications.