Collected Poems in English (ISBN 0374528381)

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

Then it hit me ý 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.

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.

A great collection:
This collection brings together Brodsky's work in English, much of which he has been intimately involved in translating. This becomes important in that, for those of us who do not speak Russian, these poems can be considered direct from Brodsky's hand, as opposed to coming through the often suspect medium of independent translator. (This seems to have been discussed in many of these reviews and is well examined in the Forward to this book.) Moreover, Brodsky's attention to meter and rhyme schemes are unerringly original and his ability with the English language is astonishing, surprising, taking the world apart in language and puts it back together in image. The edition is very appealing. Thick but easy to read.

brodsky.collected poems in english:
brodsky is a great and unfortunately, almost unknown author. this is my second book on him and i deeply recommend it.