So forth : poems / Joseph Brodsky

Nobel laureate Brodsky completed work on this sobering and brilliant collection just a week before his death this past January. Over a third of the poems collected here were written in English, Brodsky's adopted language, and the poet himself translated the rest from Russian, sometimes in collaboration. The tone of erudite melancholy which has always flavored Brodsky's verse is here so pervaded with thoughts of exile and mortality as to sometimes verge on outright despair. Among the collection's strongest works is "A Footnote to Weather Forecasts," in which "snowflakes float in the air like a good example/ of poise in a vacuum." In "New Life," Brodsky muses that "Ultimately, one's unbound/ curiosity about these empty zones,/ about these objectless vistas, is what art seems to be all about." Yet, many of these poems, especially those written in English, have a more colloquial, slang-infused rhyming style which owes a pronounced debt to Auden, as in "Song of Welcome": "Here's your food, here's your drink./ Also some thoughts, if you care to think."