Product Description

The poems of the legendary Nobel Laureate, in one volume at last

One of the greatest and grandest advocates of the literary vocation, Joseph Brodsky truly lived his life as a poet, and for it earned eighteen months in an Arctic labor camp, expulsion from his native country, and the Nobel Prize in Literature. Such were one man's wages. Here, collected for the first time, are all the poems he published in English, from his earliest collaborations with Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur, Howard Moss, and Anthony Hecht to the moving farewell poems he wrote near the end of his life. With nearly two hundred poems, several of them never before published in book form, this will be the essential volume of Brodsky's work.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #499717 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

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.

From Library Journal
Named U.S. poet laureate in 1991, Joseph Brodsky was born in Russia in 1940. His education was meager; largely self-taught, he learned a half-dozen languages in order to read and translate poetry. Writing prolifically in addition to translating, Brodsky incurred the wrath of Soviet authorities for his outspoken irony and wit, as well as for his Jewish identity. He spent five years in an Arctic labor camp before choosing exile, moving to the United States with the help of mentor W.H. Auden. Brodsky, who died of heart failure in 1996, wrote primarily in Russian; he himself translated many of his poems into English or worked closely with his translators. The collection under review consists of all his poems that were published in English. He ends the poem "At a Lecture" thus: "As the swan confessed/ to the lake: I don't like myself. But you are welcome to my reflection." This is a highly accomplished, deft, and entertaining book, with a talent for exploitation of the richness of language and with a deep core of sorrow. "There is only one way to be born," says Brodsky, "but so many ways to die." Highly recommended. Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Customer Reviews

don't believe the hype
Don't believe the petty, narrow-minded balderdash about supposed poor translations. Duh, he wrote in another language that most English speakers don't know and aren't about to learn, and it has to be translated so we can read it in English. Wow. The author, who is one of the greatest poets of the century, either translated it himself or had help from other giants of poetry, so it's how he wanted it - and it's brilliant. So it isn't exactly how it was in Russian...Ok, but it's still better than most of the poetry published in the last 50 years. Don't listen to the whining nit-pickers, and enjoy this wonderful collection. If it was up to them [those who are against translation in general] and their grotesque elitism, we wouldn't have anything translated into or out of English, or into or out of any other language, and that would be a disaster. Plus translations aren't anyway near as problematic as they think, but there's no space to go into that here.

On Brodsky
This is a large and lovely book. It collects the most significant and important verse of J. Brodsky, winner of the Nobel prize. I highly recommend it.

Brodsky speaks of history's fortune and fate as he attempts a clarification of the poet's role in a world gone amuck. There are some gems here: "On Love," "I Sit By the Window," "Odysseus to Telemachus," "The Butterfly," "Torso," "Elegy: For Robert Lowell," and "Cafe Trieste: SF," to name a few.

Brodsky's poetic voice is imaginative and celestial. His words are as light and time-transcendent as the cloud-walk of heavenly angels.

I also recommend: Z. Herbert, C. Milosz, R. Hass, W. Szymborska, A. Zagajewski, and R. Jeffers.

Then it hit me � he is dead!
Lately I havenÕt paid much attention to American Poetry. Provincial minds who spill their prosy guts over America's kitchen sink or worse and who belong into one of Ophra's spirituality binges. So it completely slipped me by, that the US had a Russian as poet laureate; the name was not familiar. Then I found his collected poems. Critics point to howlers in the translation, especially if committed by the author himself: it is true, there is space for improvement. But to blame it on the justified demand that translations of poetry have to be faithful to content and structure, rather points to inhibitions in the criticÕs judgement. As for me: I found at long last another poet of stature and rank. And yes he deserves a better presentation. (It can be done!) I became interested in his biography - born 1940 ... and then it hit me: he is already dead. And I felt sad, as if I had missed the arrival of a long lost relative.