[The works in "Selected Poems" have] been, in the wake of the Nobel, reviewed less as poems than as the work of a thinker and political figure; the poems tend to be considered en masse, in relation either to the condition of Poland, or to the suppression of dissident literature under Communist rule, or to the larger topic of European intellectual history…. [The new collection, "The Separate Notebooks," contains] poems written as early as 1934 and as late as 1980. Its appearance offers an occasion for a consideration of Milosz's work as a modern poet….

Apparently, there takes place frequently in Milosz's poetry that rise in temperature which comes when two words that have never before lived side by side suddenly mingle—provoking what we feel in English when we read of Marvell's "green thought," Traherne's "orient and immortal wheat," Donne's "unruly Sun," or Keats' "sylvan historian." This breaking down...