Amazon.com Review
In his brilliant, mercurial prose, the late Joseph Brodsky insisted tirelessly on the superiority of poetry. It's ironic, then, that his own poems--at least in their English incarnations--tend to trail his own essays by a country mile. Ordinarily you might pin the blame on the usual suspects: the translators. But Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur, Howard Moss, and Anthony Hecht are hardly hacks for hire, and neither were the other hardy souls who helped Brodsky to ease his Russian verse over the linguistic hurdles. No, the problem has more to do with the poet's stubborn attachment to formalism. Determined to echo his native rhyme schemes and rapid-fire cadences--and to accommodate his marvelous, maddening proliferation of metaphors--Brodsky wrenched his English poetry into one peculiar shape after another. Even when he's half-apologizing (in "A Song to No Music") for his verbal curlicues, he manages to leave most readers scratching their heads: "Scholastics? Almost. Just as well. / God knows. Take any for a spastic / consent. For after all, pray tell, / what in this world is not scholastic?"
All this would be irrelevant if Brodsky were not in fact a writer of dizzying talents. The worst poems here still bear the faint impress of impacted genius, and bring to mind Randall Jarrell's famous line about Walt Whitman--that "only a man with the most extraordinary feel for language, or none whatsoever, could have cooked up [his] worst messes." And when Brodsky manages to tame his Russian accent and his addiction to Euclidean props, he's capable of enormous power. His "Elegy: For Robert Lowell" is a perfect (and very Lowell-like) example: "In the autumnal blue / of your church-hooded New / England, the porcupine / sharpens its golden needles / against Bostonian bricks / to a point of needless / blinding shine." He's also a superb observer of the natural landscape, which forces his high-velocity imagination to proceed in leisurely, lyrical increments. Hence the opening of "In England":
And so you are returning, livid flesh of early dusk. The chalk
Sussex rocks fling seaward the smell of dry grass and
a long shadow, like some black useless thing. The rippling
sea hurls landward the roar of the incoming surge and
scraps of ultramarine. From the coupling of the splash of
needless water and needless dark arise, sharply
etched against the sky, spires of churches...
A caveat worth repeating: in his native Russian, Brodsky may well be one of the century's great poets. But his English-speaking audience would have benefited from a slimmed-down selection of his verse rather than the kitchen-sink approach of
Collected Poems. And in the meantime, the essays and
chalk talks collected in
Less Than One and
On Grief and Reason offer the best introduction to this sui generis figure, persuading even his most skeptical listeners that "truth depends on art," and not the other way around.
--James Marcus
From Publishers Weekly
A writer of global scope and acclaim, a Nobel Prize winner and a former U.S. poet laureate, Brodsky (1940-96) first came to U.S. readers' attention as a young Russian poet. Exiled to Siberia in the mid-'60s, and then kicked out of the Soviet Union, Brodsky arrived in the United States and began a second career in English, assisting his translators and eventually composing poems in English. This big book gathers all the poetry in English Brodsky originally saw through to press in books (or had earmarked for eventual publication), including Russian poems he translated or co-translated. Originally Russian verse from the '60s and '70s gives way to the later, sometimes lighter, work of his last two decades, when he found a second home in the speech of his adoptive country. In the earliest parts of the volume, Brodsky's attempt to render in English the formal pyrotechnics of his much-admired Russian results in awkward shifts between the demotic and the hieratic "To exist in the Era of Deeds and to stay elevated, alert/ ain't so easy, alas." But by 1978 Brodsky's English verse could be as dramatically confidentAnot to mention quotableAas these lines, from "Strophes," about middle age: "Ah, for the bounty of sibyls,/ the blackmail of future years,/ as for the lash of our middle/ names, memory, no one cares." His later work can be intimately jocular, or grandly authoritative: often he acknowledges Latin precedents or else tips his hat to the late poems of Auden. Most of Brodsky's verse in English appeared in three books, A Part of Speech (1980), To Urania (1988) and So Forth (1996). Even readers who already know and own those might want this one for its concluding forty-odd pages of previously uncollected work, and for its scrupulous bibliographical notes. Brodsky knew he had lived, and suffered, through more than most poets; he enjoyed speaking with the Voice of Experience, as his poems attest: "One's dreams,/ unlike the city, become less populous/ the older one gets."
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
