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A poet of immense moral authority, in these later poems, the poems of old age, of a long look back at the catastrophic upheavals of the twentieth century, Milosz writes with amazing clarity and a precise vision. Despite the preponderance of his themes, he writes with the lightness of touch found only in the great masters. Using his own translations and those of Robert Hass, with whom he has worked closely, this volume achieves the one task that seems necessary and at the same time impossible-to invent a language comprehensible “to both the living and the dead.” Czeslaw Milosz is the winner of the 1978 Neustadt International Prize in Literature and the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works include many volumes of poetry (most recently, Collected Poems1931-1987), the novels The Issa Valley and The Seizure of Power, the autobiographical Native Realm, the classic analysis of totalitarian thinking The Captive Mind, several volumes of essays and criticism, most recently Beginning with My Streets.Since 1961 he has been Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California at Berkeley.