In his magnificent collection of poems, The Bells in Winter, published at the time when [Milosz] won the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years ago, we could see the full flowering of his poetic art, which, like his autobiographical writings, always expresses in poignant, visionary lyrics a world that sees the historical past and the personal past as present, living memories, and thus juxtaposes the richness of the present with the ever-present and richly-remembered, richly-evoked past.

Now we have a new collection of poems that epitomizes Milosz's career as a poet. It is called The Separate Notebooks. I think that is an appropriate title for a work that gathers poems from Milosz's whole life, as well as trenchant, mysterious, lovely prose passages from his journals. This is, then, a composite work, not even arranged chronologically; rather it's put together in mosaic fashion, so that many experiences and...