So Forth by Joseph Brodsky, review by Pat Boran

So Forth, Joseph Brodsky. Hamish Hamilton. £16 hb.

PAT BORAN

(Sunday Tribune)

'Dear savages, though I've never mastered your tongue,' begins the first poem here, 'Infinitive', setting a valedictory note for this eight collection of poems by the Leningrad-born 1987 Nobel laureate who died earlier this year.

The irony of this opening statement, however - if we English speakers are to recognise ourselves in its appellation - is that Brodsky did in fact master English, having learned it, appropriately, through his reading of Auden, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens and Eliot during the twenty months he spent in a labour camp near Archangel up to November 1965, a sentence imposed on him for the crime of being a 'parasite' and a 'cosmopolitan'.

Despite this mastery, however, there is in much of Brodsky's work a straining, a sense of contortion, though it must be said that this has as much to do with his struggles to contain the enormous inventory of detail that drives so many of the poems ('Things are in truth the leeches of thought' - 'New Life') as with the difficulties of transplanting a sensibility from one language and culture to another.

The result then is poems that are not easy and seldom pretty - despite Brodsky's penchant for 'a line scrawled in haste and rhyming' ('In Front of Casa Marcello'). Even so, apart from a handful of simple lyrics, the poems seem honestly complex, mirroring the complex relationship between past and present (if less often between Russian mother-land and -tongue and American foster home than in previous collections). However, few have the quiet power of the title poem of his 1977 collection, A Part of Speech.

As might be expected of a poet addicted to cigarettes and booze (despite doctors' orders), and facing what he must have known was the end, there is also an elegiac tone throughout this book, Brodsky's response to what he calls in one poem 'the past's appetite for the future'. When in the long poem 'Vertumnus' he writes, 'Indeed the past in these parts was much more abundant / than the present!', the verb 'was' here seems only to add to the almost unbearable weight of histories, personal and shared.

This whole notion of shared histories is one which permeates the book, calling to mind the question raised in an earlier poem 'The Great Elegy for John Donne': 'For though our life may be a thing to share, / who is there in this world to share our death?' The answer discovered in this new book is that 'Life without us is, darling, thinkable' ('Porta San Pancrazio'), though the difficulty of taking this realisation on board is akin to the difficulty of the realisation that 'when a man's unhappy / that's the future' -- this, despite, or perhaps because of the way in which an earlier poem, 'A Prophecy', imagined the future as a time of bliss from which the poet might look back with something like relief on darker days.

Still there is also a more lyrical side to Brodsky, as in 'A Song' in which, longing for a simpler life, he writes 'I wish I knew no astronomy when stars appear'. But whether such simplicity is the sole province of song, while complexity is the province of poetry, is a moot point. For Brodsky poetry was the place where things had to be worked out and worried (as a bone is worried by a dog). If the Socialist Realism of Russia was what made him opt for exile in 1972, a glance at an American telephone book in the wonderful 'Song of Welcome' is still enough to remind him, unsettlingly, that 'Digits are democracy's secret aim'. The American Dream is not without its nightmare shadow.

In 'Epitaph for a Centaur', Brodsky, who was only 56, has written his own epitaph: 'And he died fairly young - because his animal part / turned out to be less durable than his humanity'.