Ever since his publication of The Captive Mind in the 1950's Czeslaw Milosz, born a Lithuanian, a famous poet in Polish, has been a man worth listening to. In that book he almost lovingly charts the subtle entrapments by which a totalitarian regime can gain the support of intellectuals…. In another splendid book, Native Realm, he also marks the slow degrees of his disenchantment which led, in the end, to his arrival in the West, which he is by no means enamoured of either….

What he has to offer [in Visions from San Francisco Bay] is a foreign and valuable scintillation. He comes from a Central European culture where 'intellectuals'—and apparently poets there fall into that category—are expected to use their intellects; to discuss, in a manner we would foolishly find embarrassing, large matters; to arrive at conclusions and to publish them….

Now, winner of the...