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