If the world came to know Milosz as the gifted defector whose prose works bared the dilemmas of conscience faced by intellectuals in a Communist society, the reader of Polish has been aware of a poet of the first magnitude considered by many, in fact, as the foremost Polish poet of this century. Beginning with the characteristically apocalyptic volumes of the 1930's, A Poem in Time Frozen (1933) and Three Winters (1936), Milosz has never ceased being a poet and it is as a poet that we must come to know him better….

Selected Poems at least affords a preliminary acquaintance. The subject range is broad, but certain concerns become recurrent: the hardship of reconciling appearance and reality, the banality of the narrowly denominational and national, the reverence for life that can only wonder in mute anguish at the destructiveness of man and yet refuse to succumb to the self-destructiveness...