The poems of the legendary Nobel Laureate, in one volume at last

One of the greatest and grandest advocates of the literary vocation, Joseph Brodsky truly lived his life as a poet, and for it earned eighteen months in an Arctic labor camp, expulsion from his native country, and the Nobel Prize in Literature. Such were one man's wages. Here, collected for the first time, are all the poems he published in English, from his earliest collaborations with Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur, Howard Moss, and Anthony Hecht to the moving farewell poems he wrote near the end of his life. With nearly two hundred poems, several of them never before published in book form, this will be the essential volume of Brodsky's work.

Five years after the death of Joseph Brodsky, the heir of the generation of Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva and especially Akhmatova, this "Collected Poems in English" for the first time gathers all his translated and original poems in English. It confirms his unique place in our literature. His abiding addiction to the English language, and particularly to the Metaphysical poets, was manifest in the industry with which he read and translated in both directions. His own efforts to translate his work, and the poems he wrote directly in English, are ambitious: the poetic "conceit" is for him functional, as it was in the 17th century, a tool for prising open difficult truths, making vertiginous connections. Susan Sontag speaks of the poems' "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".

Representative selections from the great Russian poets of the nineteenth century, chosen by the uniquely qualified Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky.

'Brodsky charged at the world . . . there is no voice, no vision, remotely like it' The New York Times Book Review Self-educated, intense, impulsive and unmoored, Joseph Brodsky emerged in mid-century Russia as a poetic virtuoso, recognized by such greats as Anna Akhmatova as their worthy heir. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972. Together, the poems in this volume unfold the project that, as Brodsky saw it, the condition of exile presented: 'to set the next man - however theoretical he and his needs may be - a bit more free.' This edition includes poems translated by Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, and poems written in English or translated by the author himself. It surveys Brodsky's tumultuous life and illustrious career, and showcases his most notable and poignant work as a poet. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Edited and introduced by Ann Kjellberg

In this richly diverse collection of essays, Joseph Brodsky casts a reflective eye on his experiences of early life in Russia and exile in America. With dazzling erudition, he explores subjects as varied as the dynamic of poetry, the nature of history and the plight of the emigre writer. There is also the humorous tale of a disastrous trip to Brazil, advice to students, a homage to Marcus Aurelius and studies of Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Horace and others. The second volume of essays following Less Than One, this collection includes Brodsky's 1987 Nobel Lecture, 'Uncommon Visage'.

Christmas poems by the Nobel Laureate

To Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother's breast, the
steam out
of the ox's nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior, the team
of Magi, the presents heaped by the door, ajar.
He was but a dot, and a dot was the star.
--from "Star of the Nativity"

Joseph Brodsky, who jokingly referred to himself as "a Christian by correspondence," endeavored from the time he "first took to writing poems seriously," to write a poem for every Christmas. He said in an interview: "What is remarkable about Christmas? The fact that what we're dealing with here is the calculation of life--or, at the very least, existence--in the consciousness of an individual, a specific individual." He continued, "I liked that concentration of everything in one place--which is what you have in that cave scene." There resulted a remarkable sequence of poems about time, eternity, and love, spanning a lifetime of metaphysical reflection and formal invention.

In Nativity Poems six superb poets in English have come together to translate the ten as yet untranslated poems from this sequence, and the poems are presented in English in their entirety in a beautiful, pocket-sized edition illustrated with Mikhail Lemkhin's photographs of winter-time St. Petersburg.

Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott--three Nobel laureates and threeof our generation's greatest poets explore the misconceptions and mythologiesthat surround one of America's most famous and beloved deceased poets--RobertFrost.

A Platonic dialogue in the form of a double anachronism--the action takes place two centuries after our era--Joseph Brodsky’s only play, Marbles, is set in a prison cell that alone provides for the three unities of classic drama: those of time, place, and action. A nightmare rather than a utopia, this play proceeds according to the immanent logic of mental aggravation as its two characters, the inmates Publius and Tullius, examine the tautology of their psychological, historical, and purely physical confines. The fusion of its dour, somewhat terrifying vision with the macabre hilarity of its verbal texture allows Marbles to take its audience beyond the farthest reaches of the theatre of the absurd, into territory more suitable for modernist imagination than for human experience.

A Part of Speech contains poems from the years 1965-1978, translated by various hands.

'Reading Brodsky's essays is like a conversation with an immensely erudite, hugely entertaining and witty (and often very funny) interlocutor' Wall Street Journal Watermark is Joseph Brodsky's witty, intelligent, moving and elegant portrait of Venice. Looking at every aspect of the city, from its waterways, streets and architecture to its food, politics and people, Brodsky captures its magnificence and beauty, and recalls his own memories of the place he called home for many winters, as he remembers friends, lovers and enemies he has encountered. Above all, he reflects with great poetic force on how the rising tide of time affects city and inhabitants alike. Watermark is an unforgettable piece of writing, and a wonderful evocation of a remarkable, unique city. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

Selected and translated by Lyn Coffin
Introduction by Joseph Brodsky

Ever since her death in 1966 Anna Akhmatova has been recognized as the greatest modern Russian poet. A rich and representative selection of Akhmatova's work—from her poignant, deeply personal love poems to her haunting laments for the martyrs of the Stalinist purges—has been newly translated by the American poet Lyn Coffin. In her finely crafted translations Coffin has been uniquely successful in reproducing the directness and striking effects characteristic of Akhmatova's poetry, and she is the first to remain true to Akhmatova's rhyme and cadence. The poems are prefaced by a thoughtful introduction by the poet Joseph Brodsky, a friend of Akhmatova in her later years.

Essayist and poet Joseph Brodsky was one of the most penetrating voices of the twentieth century. This prize-winning collection of his diverse essays includes uniquely powerful appreciations of great writers: on Dostoevsky and the development of Russian prose, on Auden and Akhmatova, Cavafy, Montale and Mandelstam. These are contrasted with his reflections on larger themes of tyranny and evil, and subtle evocations of his childhood in Leningrad. Brodsky's insightful appreciation of the intricacies of language, culture and identity connect these works, revealing his remarkable gifts as a prose writer.

Joseph Brodsky's last volume of poems in English, So Forth, represents eight years of masterful self-translation from the Russian, as well as a substantial body of work written directly in English.

Peter Viereck's career has been an ongoing experiment in the symbiosis of poetry and history. Tide and Continuities is the embodiment and culmination of that career. It includes many new poems, never before published, and work--some with stunning revisions--from books as recent as his 1987 epic, Archer in the Marrow: The Applewood Cycles, and as early as his 1948 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Terror and Decorum. Tide and Continuties is the revelation of a great American poet.

Combining two books of verse that were first published in his native Russian, To Urania was Brodsky's third volume to appear in English. Published in 1988, the year after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, this collection features pieces translated by the poet himself and others, as well as poems written originally in English.

Auden once characterized Brodsky as "a traditionalist . . . interested in what lyric poets of all ages have been interested in . . . encounters with nature . . . reflections upon the human condition, death, and the meaning of existence." Reading the poems in To Urania--by turns cerebral, caustic, comic, and celebratory--we appreciate firsthand a great lyric poet's variety and achievement.