Czeslaw Milosz reminds me of Philip Roth - publishing young and brilliantly; improving with age; equally engaged by moral responsibilities and carnal pleasures; haunted by his childhood home, a place so changed it has all but disappeared.

As early as 1936 in his poem "Encounter" he announced his theme: the specter of time lost.

We were riding through the frozen fields in a wagon at dawn./ A red wing rose in the darkness./ And suddenly a hare ran across the road./ One of us pointed to it with his hand./ That was a long time ago. Today neither of them is alive,/ Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture./ O my love, where are they, where are they going --/ The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles./ I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

That was before the war.

Milosz was born in 1911 and grew up in what is now Lithuania, but was then part of the Russian empire. He came from the Polish gentry, and spent World War II in Warsaw, where he worked in public radio, and edited and published poetry clandestinely. He witnessed the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. After the war he was a diplomat for Poland, but eventually defected in Paris and wrote a celebrated book about life under a totalitarian regime. For many years he was a professor of Polish literature at Berkeley. Late in life he moved back to Poland, settling in Krakow, where he died in 2004.

Milosz's life coincided almost exactly with the 20th century. He witnessed the terrible upheavals wrought by fascism and communism, the rapid disappearance of a traditional, almost feudal, world, the spirit of revolution of the 1960s. And throughout this history, throughout the days, the years, in every place, Milosz was also attuned to the senses, the natural world, the small gestures of humanity.

In 1943, recalling the martyrdom of the medieval philosopher Giordano Bruno in Rome's Campo dei Fiori, where the day after his funeral pyre, produce sellers set up their stalls of fruit and vegetables as normal, Milosz wrote of the destruction of the ghetto, while ordinary life continued on:

I thought of the Campo dei Fiori/ in Warsaw by the sky-carousel/ one clear spring evening/ to the strains of a carnival tune. The bright melody drowned/ the salvos from the ghetto wall,/ and couples were flying/ high in the cloudless sky./ At times wind from the burning/ would drift dark kites along/ and riders on the carousel/ caught petals in midair./ That same hot wind/ blew open the skirts of the girls/ and the crowds were laughing/ on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

Milosz struggled with his calling as a poet - the power of testimony and the relative futility of words against the cataclysmic forces of history. In "1945" he wrote:

-- You! the last Polish poet! - drunk, he embraced me,/ My friend from the Avant-Garde, in a long military coat,/ Who had lived through the war in Russia and, there, understood./ He could not have learned those things from Apollinaire,/ Or Cubist manifestos, or the festival of Paris streets./ The best cure for illusions is hunger, patience, and obedience:/ In their fine capitals they still liked to talk./ Yet the twentieth century went on. It was not they/ who would decide what words were going to mean.

In 1991, at the age of 80, even in his weariness and ambivalence, he was still unflinching and honest, writing from the island of Guadeloupe, in "Conversation with Jeanne,"

Let us not talk philosophy, Jeanne.
So many words, so much paper, who can stand it.
I told you the truth about my distancing myself.
I've stopped worrying about my misshapen life.
It was no better and no worse than the usual human tragedies.

For over thirty years we have been waging our dispute
As we do now, on the island under the skies of the tropics.
We flee a downpour, in an instant the bright sun again,
And I grow dumb, dazzled by the emerald essence of the leaves.

For these and for the last four stanzas of the poem alone, this volume is worth reading. It is indeed a perfect introduction to Milosz's work, for those who have not yet had the pleasure of knowing it, spanning the length of his career and including a tender introduction by his friend and colleague Seamus Heaney.

Like Roth, Milosz exposes the dreadful passions and machinations of an age, and his own human frailty and desires too. His warmth and dispassion alike make him a perfect witness to our time, a time that is, like all others, passing swiftly and irrevocably into the past, and yet, through these poems, will remain vivid and recognizable for any age.