Brodsky’s first book of poems appeared in New York in 1965. The present book, his second, is the first title of the Chekhov Press redivivus (under different management and a different English name, but with the identical Russian name, to keep future bibliographers on their toes). It contains seventy-one poems, of which twenty-three appeared, occasionally in unsatisfactory form, in the earlier version. The first title of a new house, the second (traditionally crucial) collection of a poet who had at the time just turned thirty (an even more fateful anniversary nowadays than it used to be) – it would seem a momentous conjunction of occasions, calling for special attention.

All concerned deserve congratulations. And since he has been rather abused in the émigré press, I specifically include the anonymous “N.N.”, author of the eccentric introduction, who, if he is an enthusiast, is at least an enthusiast for poetry rather than the cold war.

Brodsky’s finest work is in the long poem (for want of a more precise term; the divisions of the book blur what is left of such genre distinction as elegiia and poema) and in translations. The longest and most ambitious work, “Gorbunov i Gorchakov” (1965-68), is also the best. Brodsky’s headlong genius is rather like Khlebnikov’s in requiring the scope of a large work: his unit is not the line, as “N.N.” rightly observes, but a kind of syntactic period. These fourteen cantos each contain one hundred iambic pentameters, usually in ten-line stanzas with only two alternating rhymes. It is exclusively dialogue (between the two eponymous heroes, for the most part, though there are other voices), and the speeches are not attributed by any of the normal typographic devices to specific speakers. In order to keep the voices of this dizzying stichomythia apart in your mind, you must plunge in and, having determined who is who, read forward at the frenetic and urgent pace that is so characteristic of Brodsky. But they coalesce anyway, as they should, for we are dealing with another Russian geminate hero. Gorbunov, the humane, half-crazy dreamer about mushrooms and the sea (Brodsky’s symbols for peace and freedom are peculiarly Russian while being very contemporary, and universal), and his tormentor, the seksot Gorchakov, are really two facets of one anguished consciousness. The emotional and intellectual tensions built into the form itself are reminiscent of Dostoevsky. In Canto 5 (“Song in the Third Person”) Brodsky puts the phrase “i on emu skazal” through so many transformations that it finally acquires, in the manner of concrete poetry, a sort of third dimension and stands out unforgettably from the page, strange and dangerous – a kind of monument to the ritual of denunciation.

There are only four translations, all from John Donne, to whom Brodsky has addressed a justly admired elegy, reprinted here. But these four are enough to suggest that in some future history of Russian poetry Brodsky’s discovery of Donne will be a significant date. His Russian version of “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” is uneven, but where it succeeds, it succeeds wonderfully, with enjambments that do not so much translate as enact the “gold to ayery thinnesse beate.”  How fitting, too, that the “parasite” of 1964 should now have honored his native language with a splendid version of “The Flea.”