Poetry. In the history of modern poetry, Conquest occupies a permanent place. So wrote the Nobel Prize winning poet, Czeslaw Milosz, and in PENULTIMATA, his seventh collection of poems, we see further evidence of Conquest's remarkable poetic talent, a talent that stresses the art's relationship to the phenomenal universe--in particular to landscape, women, art, and war. His entirely individual poetic voice, varying from achieved lyrical sound and structure to other well-rendered forms and finish, gives us disturbing fictions, emotive landscapes, vivid erotica, off-beat humour, historical sufferings--and even odd demons, planets and philosophies.
