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“... for a few more months – and in addition to quoting Shakespeare, Shelley, Elizabeth Bishop and Joseph Brodsky to your friends, you might be memorising apothegms from Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, because even though you are enlightened and liberated, you are in pain over a man and jealous of his official girlfriend (you are, of course, the ...”

“... Introducing Karen Solie, I would adapt what Joseph Brodsky said some thirty years ago of the great Les Murray: ‘It would be as myopic to regard Mr Murray as an Australian poet as to call Yeats an Irishman. He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.’ Solie is Canadian (born in 1966, in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, of Norwegian immigrant stock), the author of three previous books of poems, Short Haul Engine (2001), Modern and Normal (2005) and Pigeon (2009), and now this ‘new and selected’, and, yes, she is the one by whom the language lives ...”

“... York his career took off. A kind-hearted Slavicist volunteered to translate him; his old friend Joseph Brodsky recommended him to the New Yorker, which soon published a number of his stories; Andrew Wylie took him on as a client; Knopf published his books. But what he longed for was publication in Russia. Appearing in the New Yorker didn’t mean much ...”

“... nihilism, his boundless self-pity disguised as principled hatred of everything. His fixation on Joseph Brodsky as the mortal enemy blocking his route to world fame. And the banality of Limonov’s ‘scandalous’ books, suggestive of Henry Miller’s, if Miller were viciously bloody-minded and thought Stalin was the greatest thing since apricot ...”

“... When Joseph Roth was asked once to write about his earliest memory, he described how as a baby he had seen his mother strip his cradle and hand it over to a strange woman, who ‘holds it to her chest, as though it were some trifling object of negligible dimensions, speaks for a long time, smiles, showing her long yellow teeth, goes to the door and leaves the house ...”

“... of tasting-notes, the nonce-Scottish design, the resourceful, somehow tailor-made unpleasantness. Joseph Brodsky used to say: aesthetics before ethics. How, then, given that one pub is described as having ‘muted ragu tones’, and another a ‘burgundy honeycomb’ of a ceiling, can we possibly hope for even passable behaviour from any of the ...”

“... la Musique’, Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress’, Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March), public music as a backdrop to private musings better still. Eastbourne, (August) Bank Holiday – ‘the English ferragosto’, Montale domesticates it in a letter – a country taking its ease, luxuriating in ...”

“... his Learning, and at his Return brought over with him two Master Ship-builders, John Deane and Joseph Noy’. In England, he sailed constantly, witnessed a mock battle in Portsmouth, saw a new bomb vessel demonstrated at Deptford and drank liberally with many a sea captain. (At Deptford, he may also have fathered the landscape painter Alexander ...”

“... and absence. ‘A Morning in Vicenza’ goes on to become an elegy to two admired friends, Joseph Brodsky and Krzysztof Kieslowski, but it could have gone anywhere (I quoted the first of its three stanzas). This unpredictability, storylessness, geographical unattachment, is a feature of Zagajewski; the Selected Poems (cut down from a somewhat ...”

“... writer, late in life, that he speaks up for those who have fallen foul of the Soviet regime, for Joseph Brodsky or for Solzhenitsyn, writers he could never admire but whom he is ready to support – he even arranges for jeans (or ‘dungarees’, as he puts it) to be sent to Brodsky in Russia. He writes to the ...”

“... the drift of these lines six years later in stanza five – ‘a real morsel’, according to Joseph Brodsky – of ‘September 1, 1939’: Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we ...”

“... Kelebek Korse, or Butterfly Corset, a bra shop that has been on Istiklal Caddesi since 1936. Joseph Brodsky travelled to Istanbul in the 1980s because he felt ‘for some reason, that here, in apartments, shops and coffeehouses, I should find intact an atmosphere that at present seems to have totally vanished everywhere else’. Inside these ...”

“... and a startlingly original verbal texture. Good rhymed versions of her poetry have been done by Joseph Brodsky and by Robin Kemball, who translated the whole of Tsvetaeva’s collection The Demesne of the Swans. The late Eve Malleret managed in her French translations to convey, not only Tsvetaeva’s metres and rhymes, but also her stylistic ...”

“... books were available to them, rather than too few? In his brief but authoritative introduction Joseph Brodsky says that Irina Ratushinskaya is ‘a poet with a voice of her own, piercing but devoid of hysteria’, who has been influenced but not taken over by the majestic voices of the Russian poets of the persecuted epoch – Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva ...”

“... but which is not afraid to hazard a connection between Mandelstam’s exile and that of Joseph Brodsky (to whom it is addressed), and then to Walcott’s softer exile. Abjuring Hill’s clenched penitence, yet mindful of his own rude belatedness, Walcott joins himself in ideal alliance with Brodsky and ...”