Books, Arts & Manners: Whence This?

To Urania, by Joseph Brodsky (Farrar, Straus, 160 pp., $14.95)

What has happened to Joseph Brodsky, last year’s “winner of the Nobel Prize for literature,” as the jacket of his new collection, To Urania, so proudly declares? A Part of Speech, his preceding volume of verse (in between, there appeared a fine book of essays, Less Than One), was unmistakably poetry, whether or not one liked a particular poem or even the book as a whole. (I did.) To Urania, however, is—with the exception of a couple of short pieces at the beginning—all opaque maunderings in tormented English or, worse yet, doggerel. You can’t even blame it on the Nobel Prize, which came later. If I believed in that prize (I don’t), I would ask that Brodsky’s laurels, or epaulets, be removed. The next collection could proclaim, “Winner of the Devil’s Island Award for poetry.”

JS

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John Simon

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To Urania, by Joseph Brodsky (Farrar, Straus, 160 pp., $14.95)

What has happened to Joseph Brodsky, last year’s “winner of the Nobel Prize for literature,” as the jacket of his new collection, To Urania, so proudly declares? A Part of Speech, his preceding volume of verse (in between, there appeared a fine book of essays, Less Than One), was unmistakably poetry, whether or not one liked a particular poem or even the book as a whole. (I did.) To Urania, however, is—with the exception of a couple of short pieces at the beginning—all opaque maunderings in tormented English or, worse yet, doggerel. You can’t even blame it on the Nobel Prize, which came later. If I believed in that prize (I don’t), I would ask that Brodsky’s laurels, or epaulets, be removed. The next collection could proclaim, “Winner of the Devil’s Island Award for poetry.”