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Chaplain of shadows.

Article Excerpt
SECOND SPACE By CZESLAW MILOSZ Translated by the author and Robert Hass Ecco. 102 pp. $23.95.

Second Space is the final collection of poems by the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who died last August at the age of 93. A short book, it nevertheless finds room for all of Milosz's most important concerns and demonstrates the full range of his genius. Many of the poems collected here have a decidedly valedictory tone: they are not only poems written in old age--Milosz had been writing those for decades--but poems written at the end of life, about the end of life and whatever would follow it.

Like many poets of his time, Milosz often seemed to have more religious desire than faith, and more religious anxiety than desire. What made him slightly unusual was that he was never complacent about this. He admired and envied those who seemed to have greater faith, and among his intellectual and artistic heroes were many saints and mystics. He often took the part of Job, and sometimes took it further than Job did, honorably refusing what he regarded as theological evasions of the problem of suffering. But finally he had more in common with the man in the gospel who begs Christ for faith--"Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief" (Mark 9:24). Milosz uses a very similar formulation more than once in Second Space....