Cynthia Haven: Books
Czesław Miłosz: Conversations
"The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history."
Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) felt that part of his role as a poet and critic was to bear witness to bloodshed and terror as well as to beauty. He survived the Soviet invasion of his beloved Lithuania, escaped to Nazi-occupied Warsaw where he joined the Socialist resistance, then witnessed the Holocaust and the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto. After persecution and censorship triggered his defection in 1951, he found not relief but the anguish of solitude and obscurity.
In the years of loneliness and labor, Miłosz continued writing poems and essays, learning to love his privacy and preoccupations and enjoying the devotion of his students at the University of California, Berkeley. International fame came like lightning when Miłosz won the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Czesław Miłosz: Conversations collects pieces from a wide range of sources over twenty-five years and includes an unpublished interview between Miłosz and his friend and fellow Nobel Laureate poet Joseph Brodsky. This volume acquaints us with a man whose work, life, and thought defy easy characterization. He is a sensualist with a scholar's penchant for history, as likely to celebrate Heraclitus as the hooks on a woman's corset. He is a devout but doubting Catholic, and a thinker tinged with a heretical sensibility
– The University Press of Mississippi
Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven
A 137 page volume, comprising an extended interview in which Dale talks about his life and literary friendships, and more particularly about his work as a poet, translator, editor and critic. The book also contains a career sketch, a comprehensive bibliography, several pages of quotations from Dale's critics and reviewers, four recent poems and a gallery of black and white photos, as well as a colour reproduction of a portrait of Dale by the painter Mike Coleman."
Three Poets in Conversation:
Dick Davis, Rachel Hadas, Timothy Steele
A 150 page volume, containing extended conversations between the poets Dick Davis, Rachel Hadas and Timothy Steele and, respectively, Clive Wilmer, Isaac Cates and Cynthia Haven. The poets talk about their work and their lives in unrivalled detail.
Joseph Brodsky: Conversations
"If there's any deity to me, it's language."
-Joseph Brodsky
An invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz
An invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz is forthcoming with Ohio University Press / Swallow Press.