Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz selects and introduces 300 of his favorite poems from poets from around the world in this “magnificent collection” that ranges “widely across time and continents, from eighth century China to contemporary americanca” (San Francisco Chronicle).

Czeslaw Milosz's A Book of Luminous Things—his personal selection of poems from the past and present—is a testament to the stunning varieties of human experience, offered up so that we may see the myriad ways that experience can be shared in words and images.

Milosz provides a preface to each of these poems, divided into thematic (and often beguiling) sections, such as "Travel," "History," and "The Secret of a Thing," that make the reading as instructional as it is inspirational and remind us how powerfully poetry can touch our minds and hearts.

Includes such poems as:

• The Kingfisher by Mary Oliver
• A Sleepless Night by Philip Levine
• A Narrow Fellow in the Grass by Emily Dickinson
• The Most of It by Robert Frost
• I am the Poet by Walt Whitman
• The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams
• View with a Grain of Sand by Wislawa Szymborska
• A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley by ALlen Ginsberg
• Brazil, January 1, 1502 by Elizabeth Bishop
• I Go Back to May 1937 by Sharon Olds
• The Card-Players by Philip Larkin
• Wine by Raymond Carver
• For the Anniversary of My Death by W.S. Merwin