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“... When Joseph Brodsky died in January 1996, there was in Russia a strong tendency to oversimplify his life, to reduce it to an outline, and at the same time to mythologise it as Pushkin’s life has been mythologised. It wasn’t so much that a second Pushkin had died, but that people wanted Brodsky to conform to their idea of a poet, and their idea of a poet is Pushkin ...”

“... of a living organism’s subordination to the laws of nature. No life is meant to be preserved. Joseph Brodsky, In a Room and a Half ‘I really ought to stop climbing trees,’ you said, nipping the filter off another low-tar cigarette then settling your arm lightly on my shoulder, giving me a squeeze as if you didn’t know that you were ...”

“... occasionally with a perfectly-modulated few lines, forceful without stridency, totally assured. Joseph Brodsky is the latest Russian poet to be taken up in the United States and given the multiple-translation treatment first accorded to Voznesensky fifteen years ago. Among his translators are such supremely craftsmanlike American poets as Hecht and ...”

“... last saucerful of coffee.) One afternoon, when we no longer went there like Hem to the War, I saw Joseph Brodsky sitting in the window with paper and a cigarette, the recording angel, miles away. Reported Speech It’s just abstract, you say: when I’m not here, I don’t exist and my perspectives are warped. Nostalgia, the bloom of recollection – a ...”

“... Joseph Brodsky’s new selection, To Urania, gets off to a troubled start with a 20-line poem that contains at least one grammatical slip and a sentence of baffling absurdity. The slip occurs in line four, where we meet the construction ‘dined with the-devil-knows-whom’ – an accusative that seems to me justified by neither the rule-book nor colloquial usage ...”

“... I had my eye on – probably all appalled to be mentioned in each other’s company, and by me: Joseph Brodsky, Tom Paulin and, most intimately though I knew him least, Ian Hamilton. When I sent him a copy of my first book, I realised I’d even purloined his initials for my title. I wasn’t of an age to have been reading, never mind submitting ...”

“... Russian-American poets. ‘I tried to imitate you for two years,’ he writes in his ‘Elegy for Joseph Brodsky’. ‘It feels like burning/and singing about burning …/You would be ashamed of these wooden lines.’There’s nothing wooden about Kaminsky’s poetry now. It bursts with energy and can sometimes display internal stresses that make its ...”

“... whose genius has gone?’ Lev Loseff asks in his poem ‘June 1972’; Loseff’s close friend Joseph Brodsky had left Leningrad that month. The question brings to mind the title of Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel, which soon came to codify a central preoccupation of the Russian intelligentsia. But in this instance it also raises the notion that the ...”

“... To mix a metaphor, the mind, to be the pièce de résistance, has to be off the beaten track. Joseph Brodsky claimed to think that 90 per cent of love poetry was postcoital; Williams’s stories, with only one or two exceptions, come in the wake of break-ups. The lover – the bird or bard – has flown. The reader may very well think this is no bad ...”

“... feel. The poems for or about recently dead friends and poets (Ted Hughes, Zbigniew Herbert, Joseph Brodsky, Norman MacCaig and George Mackay Brown) tend to be wide-ranging meditations on literature and language.In his criticism as well as his poetry, Heaney has always excelled at finding metaphors of process for the act of ...”

“... subversiveness, for embedding his satire in the language itself. In Less than One (1986), Joseph Brodsky likened a page of Platonov to a great department store with its apparel items turned inside out ... His every sentence drives the Russian language into a semantic dead-end or, more precisely, reveals a proclivity for dead-ends, a blind-alley ...”

“... With Joseph Roth, you begin – and end – with the prose. The great delight of this Austrian novelist, who wrote in the Twenties and Thirties, lies in his strange, nimble, curling sentences, which are always skewing into the most unexpected metaphors. It is rare to find luminous powers of realism and narrative clarity so finely combined with a high poetic temperature ...”

“... that is both fluent and memorable. As a bonus, there is a section consisting of two poems by Joseph Brodsky – one on Cape Cod, the other on Venice. Translated by Hecht – better, it seems to me, than ever before – here are more of Brodsky’s short unrelated sentences following each other with uncompromising ...”

“... poets writing in English, one of a superleague that includes Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky’. This is astonishingly vulgar, and I suppress the author’s name to spare his blushes. But if we reject the notion that poets can be ranked internationally like sprinters or discus-throwers, still we must take note that this is how Les ...”

“... or abroad. Poets liked him. Seamus Heaney of course liked him, but so did others as dissimilar as Joseph Brodsky, Andrew Motion and (one of his first translators) Robert Bly. Poets were drawn to translate him too: fellow Northerners like Robin Fulton (for a long time now a resident of Norway, though 48 years ago for small reward he was teaching me ...”