The poems in Bells in Winter, interspersed with prose, are of several kinds: philosophical, science-oriented, historical, surreal, phantasmagoric, satirical, Western American or Eastern European in their landscapes. Christianity and war hover in the background; not infrequently, the setting is academia, with its own little wars. At times, this is pleasant enough middle-of-the-road poetry…. [One poem, "Ars Poetica?",] has the urbane tone of a civilized man speaking to his equals, but there is not much real poetry in it: sophisticated conversation must, to rise into poetry, become fiercely emblematic, unexpectedly archetypal. (pp. 49-50)

At other times, the tone is more visionary: "We were flying over a range of snowpeaked mountains/And throwing dice for the soul of the condor./—Should we grant reprieve to the condor?/—No, we won't grant reprieve to the condor./It didn't eat from the tree of knowledge and so it must perish." This, like so much of Milosz, is religiously tinted vagueness, and comes from a sequence of six fairly long poems, "From the Rising of the Sun," which is a sort of summa poetica,… written in any number of forms, all of them rather uninteresting. It contains a goodly amount of autobiography…. But, in the end, most of this is rather windy, amorphous, unmemorable, with a tendency to veer into opacity or banality. (p. 50)

[Nowhere] do I find strong evidence that Milosz is, as the poet and cultural politician Joseph Brodsky claims for him on the jacket, "one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest." By far the best piece in this collection is a short, wistful yet wry, lyric dating back to 1936, "Encounter."… That, at least, is straightforward, unaffected, affecting. (pp. 50-1)