«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'.»

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.

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.

«In this brief, intense, gem-like book, equal parts extended autobiographical essay and prose poem, Brodsky turns his eye to the seductive and enigmatic city of Venice. A mosaic of 48 short chapters — each recalling a specific episode from one of his many visits there (Brodsky spent his winters in Venice for nearly 20 years) — «Watermark» associatively and brilliantly evokes one city's architectural and atmospheric character. In doing so, the book also reveals a subject — and an author — readers have never before seen.»

Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott — three Nobel laureates and threeof our generation's greatest poets explore the misconceptions and mythologies that surround one of America's most famous and beloved deceased poets — Robert Frost.

«This collection of essays thrusts Brodsky — heretofore known more for his poetry and translations — into the forefront of the «Third Wave» of Russian emigre writers. His insights into the works of Dostoyevsky, Mandelstam, Platonov, as well as non-Russian poets Auden, Cavafy and Montale are brilliant. While the Western popularity of many other Third Wavers has been stunted by their inability to write in English, Brodsky consumed the language to attain a «closer proximity» to poets such as Auden. The book, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, opens and closes with revealing autobiographical essay.»

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