Selections

Sebastian Milej, as he writes, is capable of "a crime masked by dignity." He is a seer into "being, inlaid and marginal," who lives in a world of senators and ostriches, of Chopin nocturnes and of "sham pearls" poured "over a dark wood floor." He lives a mightier life than you or I do, one half-immersed in dream, the charged, ambiguous existence of someone who, like Rimbaud, has systematically disordered all his senses and has declared a new, ecstatic kingdom of love. Indeed, he is like Rimbaud when he declares "I awake to a festival of kisses." Milej's radical apprehension of language has revived the root meanings inherent in his startling vocabulary. When he writes about "the pending season," we see hanging grapes, just as when he refers to "the parole of spring" we see the season's "word" as well as its clemency. Milej is a poet who belongs to some earlier, more dangerous race of men or gods; he is the deity who can say that he speaks with "a dazed fly at the base of my teeth." --- Edmund White