One of my favorite poets, Czeslaw Milosz, died yesterday at 93. He was a Polish Nobel Laureate, and professor at UC Berkeley. My friend Brent and I used to send his poems back and forth to one another in college. Sometimes ending a letter with a poem in longhand, other times merely sending a poem via email. He was for us an honest voice in a sea of misdirection. He had an abiding faith in God, but often questioned God's goodness and control, which seemed to Brent and I to smack of the reality that we were experiencing at the time. He also had a great sense of the irony of things but still maintained a healthy amount of wonder. He was Thoreau, except he'd seen dead bodies floating in the river that flowed near his boyhood home.

I guess I could say a lot of things about what he meant to me, but mostly I love him for his language. Even translated into English (thank you Robert Hass) his prose has a fine tuned athleticism and honesty that's so good it makes you want to cry. He was your favorite Grandpa parroting T.S. Eliot. He was a master, and I will miss his work.