Joseph Brodsky poems, prose

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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?"

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