Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #628566 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

Review
"I know Joseph Brodsky as a world poet--partly because I cannot read him in Russian; mainly because that's the range he commanded in his poems, with their extraordinary velocity and density of material notation, of cultural reference, of attitude. He insisted that poetry's 'job' (a much-used word) was to explore the capacity of language to travel farther, faster. Poetry, he said, is accelerated thinking. It was his best argument, and he made many, on behalf of the superiority of poetry to prose."
--Susan Sontag
"Brodsky charged at the world with full intensity and wrestled his perceptions into lines that fairly vibrate with what they are asked to hold. There is no voice, no vision, remotely like it."
--Sven Birkerts, "The New York Times Book Review "

Synopsis
Presents the collected English poems of the former Poet Laureate of the United States who was exiled from his native Russia, only to go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987.

Customer Reviews

Finally here; the complete poems of Joseph Brodsky.
The book contains all of Brodsky's published poems in English. (All the ones that have appeared in books form). Based on the three titles of poetry published in English during his lifetime; "A Part of Speech", "To Urania" and "So Forth". In addition this collection includes a chapter of uncollected poems and translations by Brodsky of other poets works; about twenty poems. Amongst these are poems by Wislawa Szymborska, Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva.

The poems are written in English directly, or translated from Russian, either by the author himself or by Brodsky in collaboration with other translators.

It's a nice collection, but it offers little new if you already own the three prior books. One good exception is an extensive section of notes to the poems that are most informative. It is also worth mentioning that in the foreword of the book a second collection of poems is promised to be underway, this one containing poems translated from Russian outside of Brodsky's supervision.