Iosif Brodsky. So Forth

Contents

• Infinitive ("Dear savages, though I've never mastered your tongue, free of pronouns and gerunds...") (1994)
• A Song ("I wish you were here, dear...") (1989)
• A Footnote to Weather Forecasts ("A garden alley with statues of hardened mud...") (1986)
• Star of the Nativity ("In the cold season, in a locality accustomed to heat more than...") (December 1987)
• New Life ("Imagine that war is over, that peace has resumed its reign...") (1988)
• Angel ("A white, pure-cotton angel...") (1992)
• An Admonition ("Trekking in Asia, spending nights in odd dwellings, in...") (1986)
• In Memory of My Father: Australia ("You arose---I dreamt so last right---and left for...") (1989)
• So Forth ("Summer will end. September will come. Once more it's okay to shoot...") (1989)
• Constancy ("Constancy is an evolution of one's living quarters into...") (1989)
• Brise Marine ("Dear, I ventured out of the house late this evening, merely...") (1989)
• Centaurs I ("They briskly bounce out of the future and having cried "Futile!"...")
• Centaurs II ("Part ravishing beauty, part sofa, in the vernacular---Sophie...")
• Centaurs III ("A marble-white close-up of the past-cum-future hybrid...")
• Centaurs IV ("The instep-shaped landscape, the shade of a jackboot, with nothing moving...") (1988)
• Epitaph for a Centaur ("To say that he was unhappy is either to say too much...") (1988)
• Axiom ("The world was wrought of a mixture of dirt, water, fire...") (1990)
• North of Delphi ("The plight of a pawn tells the king what it's all about...") (1989)
• Exeter Revisited ("Playing chess on the oil tablecloth at Sparky's...") (1988)
• Vertumnus ("I met you the first time ever in latitudes you'd call foreign...") (1990)
• Nativity ("No matter what went on around them; no matter...") (December 1990)
• Postcard from Lisbon ("Monuments to events that never took place: to bloody...") (1988)
• August Rain ("In broad daylight it starts to get dark with breathless...") (1988)
• Venice: Lido ("A rusty Romanian tanker, wallowing out in the azure...") (1989)
• Fin de Siècle ("The century will soon be over, but sooner it will be me...") (1989)
• Porta San Pancrazio ("The bees haven't buzzed away, nor has a horseman galloped...") (1989)
• Transatlantic ("The last twenty years were good for practically everybody...") (1991)
• View from the Hill ("Here is your frozen city cut into marble cubes...") (1992)
• Homage to Girolamo Marcello ("Once in winter I, too, sailed in...") (1988)
• Elegy ("Sweetheart, losing your looks, go to live in a village...") (1992)
• Anti-Shenandoah: Two Skits and a Chorus ("Why don't we board a train and go off to Persia?...") (1992)
• Daedalus in Sicily ("All his life he was building something, inventing something...") (1993)
• Clouds ("Ah, summer clouds...") (1989)
• Cappadocia ("A hundred and forty thousand warriors of Mithridates Ponticus...") (1992)
• Ab Ovo ("Ultimately, there should be a language...") (1996)
• Via Funari ("Ugly gargoyles peek out of your well-lit window...") (1995)
• Portrait of Tragedy ("Let's look at the face of tragedy. Let's see its creases...") (1991)
• Törnfallet ("There is a meadow in Sweden...") (1990/1993)
• Persian Arrow ("Your wooden shaft has vanished; so has the body...") (1993)
• Song of Welcome ("Here's your mom, here's your dad...") (1992)
• Elegy ("Whether you fished me bravely out of the Pacific...") (1995)
• Kolo ("In march the soldiers...") (1995)
• Lullaby ("Birth I gave you in a desert...") (December 1992)
• Homage to Chekhov ("Sunset clings to the samovar, abandoning the veranda...") (1993)
• Ischia in October ("Once a volcano here belched with zest...") (1993)
• Anthem ("Praised be the climate...") (1995)
• In Front of Casa Marcello ("The sun's setting, and the corner bar bangs its shutters...") (1995)
• After Us ("After us, it is certainly not the flood...") (1994)
• A tale ("In walks the Emperor, dressed as Mars...") (1995)
• Ode to Concrete ("You'll outlast me, good old concrete...") (1995)
• At the City Dump of Nantucket ("The perishable devours the perishable in broad daylight...") (1995-96)
• A Photograph ("We lived in a city tinted the color of frozen vodka...") (1994)
• A Postcard ("The country is so populous that polygamists and serial...") (1994)
• Reveille ("Birds acquaint themselves with leaves...") (1996)
• Blues ("Eighteen years I've spent in Manhattan...") (1992)
• At a Lecture ("Since mistakes are inevitable, I can easily be taken...") (1994)
• In Memory of Clifford Brown ("It's not the color blue, it's the color cold...") (1993)
• Love Song ("If you were drowning, I'd come to the rescue...") (1995)
• To My Daughter ("Give me another life, and I'll be singing...") (1994)
• Flourish ("O if the birds sang while the clouds felt bored by singing...") (1994)
• MCMXCIV ("Lousy times: nothing to steal and no one to steal from...") (1994)
• MCMXCV ("The clowns are demolishing the circus. The elephants have run off to India...") (1995)
• View with a Flood ("A somewhat familiar landscape, currently flooded. Currently...") (1993)
• Taps ("I've been reproached for everything save the weather...") (1994)