So Forth: Poems (Paperback)

by Joseph Brodsky (Author)
Key Phrases: Varvara Andreevna

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
A collection of poems in English by Joseph Brodsky, the supremely accomplished Russian poet who stood up to the repression of his native land and then constructed a whole new literary life and a huge reputation while in exile in the United States. Already established as a great Russian poet, Brodsky astonishingly achieved the equivalent in his adoptive language. Most of the poems in So Forth were written during the 10 years before his death, and while many exhibit his newly Americanized tongue, some revel in the mysterious accents that characterized his Russian works. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly
Nobel laureate Brodsky completed work on this sobering and brilliant collection just a week before his death this past January. Over a third of the poems collected here were written in English, Brodsky's adopted language, and the poet himself translated the rest from Russian, sometimes in collaboration. The tone of erudite melancholy which has always flavored Brodsky's verse is here so pervaded with thoughts of exile and mortality as to sometimes verge on outright despair. Among the collection's strongest works is "A Footnote to Weather Forecasts," in which "snowflakes float in the air like a good example/ of poise in a vacuum." In "New Life," Brodsky muses that "Ultimately, one's unbound/ curiosity about these empty zones,/ about these objectless vistas, is what art seems to be all about." Yet, many of these poems, especially those written in English, have a more colloquial, slang-infused rhyming style which owes a pronounced debt to Auden, as in "Song of Welcome": "Here's your food, here's your drink./ Also some thoughts, if you care to think." "Lullaby" shares its title with one of Auden's most famous verses: "Grow accustomed to the desert/ as to fate/ lest you find it omnipresent/ much too late." Brodsky doesn't always seem fully comfortable in this more casual mode; often his slang is clearly not that of a native speaker. But this is a small quibble in the face of an astonishing collection from a writer able to mix the cerebral and the sensual, the political and the intimate, the elegiac and the comic. In the book's final poem, "Taps," Brodsky, imagining his death, seems to offer a self-effacing wink, as if he were amused by the power he claims for poetry: "I'll twinkle among the wires, a sky's lieutenant,/ and hide in clouds when thunder roars,/ blind to the troops as they fold their pennant/ and run, pursued by the pen, in droves." Brodsky's death is a loss to literature; his final collection of poems is the best consolation we could ask for.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (March 4, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374525536
• ISBN-13: 978-0374525538
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,286,095 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Translating the Clouds, February 11, 2003

By	Dorion Sagan (East Coast, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A forced exile from Leningrad who went on to live in New York and New England, and teach at Mount Holyoke College, Joseph Brodsky is a serious poet--a brilliant self-translator of his own often brilliant poems--the National Poet Laureate under Clinton--and a man who advocated putting poetry books rather than Bibles in hotes drawers. Well I'm not sure one can find infinite solace or religious consolation proper in this work (which was, if not the last, then among the last of Brodsky's works--with many of the poems written in the mid-nineties shortly before his death in his fifties), one will find moral guidance at its non-preachy best. Like other poets, Brodsky writes of love and loss and the end of the century (one of the half-rhyming translated poems is entitled "fin de siecle"), but he does so with a certain nobility, a certain nongrandiose majesty that lifts him, without any display of effort on his part, to the ranks of the very finest poets ever. Unlike fellow exile Vladimir Nabokov, for example, who seems always to be arguing, thinking about arguing, or making a flourish of having no need to argue, for his posthumous recognition--and whose works, translated by his son, always seem a bit overwritten--Brodsky's poems read fresh and direct in his own translations. And yet, as with the greats of the Russian literary legacy (Chekov's characters are the subject of one poem), we are reminded in reading Brodsky that story-telling and poetry have reached peaks out of the purview of those who cannot appreciate say Pushkin in the original. Observation is a kind of translation, and there is the opposite problem, or rather tendency, of Brodsky's view of America (like Nabokov's) having something strangely quaint and distorted about it--as if strip malls could provide Americans with something more than the generic backdrop against which the exile spins his reveries and measures his memories. It is strange to see the archetypal nonexotic of America made strange through the exile's eyes. We must be grateful for Brodsky for taking the time to translate his own works. In this volume Brodsky laments the passing of time, the aging of lovers, the encroaching of death--he captures long-vanished armies in his poetic net, advises his daughter on where to look for him once he is gone. There is an uncompromising realism in him that is both frightening and refreshing. I thought "Clouds"--"lighter than the body/better than the soul"--one of the best poems ever written--or should I say translated.