Joseph Brodsky Selected Poems Author:Joseph Brodsky, George L. Klline (Translator) Since early June, 1972, when Russian poet Joseph Brodsky was officially "invited" to leave the Soviet Union (where he has never been allowed to publish his poems), hardly a month has passed without some conspicuous article about him in the American press. At 33, Brodsky is a literary figure of international stature, of particular inter... more »est because his work - unlike Yevtushenko's and Voznezensky's - is intensely inward, metaphysical, almost mystical, and wholly nonpolitical. These are the very factors which have incensed the Soviet authorities against him, and his having been born a Jew has not helped matters. Nor has the evidence in his recent work of his increasing commitment to Christianity.
This selection, superbly translated by George L. Kline in close collaboration with th e poet, contains more than fifty poems, including the famous Elegy for John Donne (whose poems Brodsky has translated into Russian), his Verses on the Death of T.S. Eliot, and two cantos of his extraordinary long poem Gorbunov and Gorchakov. W.H. Auden, on the basis of these translations, hailed Brodsky as a poet of the first order. « less