[In Visions from San Francisco Bay] Milosz gives us the underpinnings of those bleak themes (The Captive Mind, Native Realm, The Issa Valley) that the Stockholm judges awarded so highly. And Milosz is nothing but honest with us. He variously searches, gets lost, theorizes and struggles to manage the hodgepodge that is his own life and the life of polymorphic Berkeley. He is the exile on the pavement, amid all the wanderers stoned on cannabis, religion, politics and ecology….

This artistic honesty and variety is not, however, without its shortcomings. The prose can be intense and thick, so painfully personal that it nearly forbids admittance, particularly in sections of rather esoteric philosophizing. But when Milosz focuses on particular persons or places, his essays move with excitement….

Milosz is marvelous at the abutment of all the world and its history with 1969 Berkeley (year of the original publication in Polish...