Czeslaw Milosz's new and collected poems 1931-2001. (When words don't fail).

On September 11 and in the days after, I happened to be reading Czeslaw Milosz's New and Collected Poems 1931-2001 and a newly published selection of his essays. It's one thing, I was reminded, to read about smoking ruins and daily horrors in occupied Europe fifty years ago, and another to see them before one's eyes. As an immigrant who grew up in that world, I could never comprehend the thrill of movie audiences in this country at the sight of wholesale killing and bombs exploding in some action movie. They were having one hell of a good time and were clearly hoping for more carnage. Despite many serious warnings about terrorism in recent years, we based so much of our intellectual and political life on the premise that history would take place elsewhere while we continued to sit in front of our TVs listening to canned laughter. Consequently, much of what one reads today in the op-ed pages of our newspapers is clueless. Far better to read a veteran of historical tragedies like Milosz. In one of his essays, h e writes about totalitarian terror, but it applies as well to our situation now. Terror, he says, is not monumental; it is abject. It has a furtive glance. It destroys the fabric of human society and its relationships. How true, one thinks, and how too that clarity of mind gives one hope.

Charles Simic is professor of English at the university of New Hampshire. His most recent collection of poems, Night Picnic, was published by Harcourt this fell.