"Wherever I am, at whatever place on earth, I hide from people the conviction that I am not from here. It's as if I'd been sent, to extract as many colors, tastes, smells, to experience everything that is a man's share, to transpose what is felt into a magical register and carry it there, from whence I came"! This was a task that the Nobel Prize-winning poet, Czeslaw Milosz, achieved in ample abundance. As his friend, and fellow laureate, Joseph Brodsky noted, by first and foremost producing one of the most significant bodies of poetry in the Twentieth Century that range from the metaphysics of being, through the tides of history and the flows of nature and to the intimacies of the personal, often weaving the threads of all four dimensions into bright tapestries of illumination. But though he might imagine himself a celestial castaway exploring earth, he was, in truth, a man from many places. Starting with an idyllic childhood in Lithuania, he went to Warsaw a...