This was Brodsky's last poetry collection, published shortly after his death in 1996, and it contains poems written from about 1989 onwards, some in English and some in Russian (most of the Russian poems appear here in his own English translation, a few were translated by others). The themes are often quite dark, dealing with topics like war, exile and old age — although he was only in his fifties, he had been in poor health for a long time and seems to have known death was just round the corner. But there are also several of his famous nativity poems, a couple of longer poems on subjects from classical mythology, and some of the love poems and satires in the collection turn out to be surprisingly bouncy.

Brodsky obviously shared with his friend Auden a fondness for using jokey language about serious subjects, and it's wonderful to see the panache with which he misuses the English language to good effect. It's difficult to imagine a poet who was a native English speaker having the nerve to rhyme "Senegal" with "chemical" and "sketch pad" with "stupid" in the same quatrain, but Brodsky does so (and worse, far, far, worse...) and gets away with it every time.

He also loves clouds, and they lead to some of his most extravagant images: they "are scattered, like a bachelor's clothes" in one poem, or rear up their "huge lid like a Steinway" in another; in yet another "Clouds of patently absurd / But endearing shapes assert / The resemblance of their lot / To a cumulative thought," and in addition to all that there's a whole, very wonderful, poem about the summer clouds of the Baltic that everyone ought to read.

Good stuff! ( )

"Great!" cries the Emperor. "What one conquers
is up to the scholar's quills.
And let the Treasury boys go bonkers
trying to pay the bills."

My reading of this late Brodsky collection was deeply influenced by yesterday's experience with the biography. Medical issues hover just off the page. Overpopulation and climate change abound. Seeking not only solace but perspective, Brodsky heralds objects at the expense of memory. The latter being but ubiquitous cigarette smoke.

The citation above highlights the eternal recurrence. My wife's brother alerted me this morning that he's found a parcel of goats for me to shepherd should we find ourselves compelled to relocate overseas. ( )

NA