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. The absurd sentence follows two lines later. 'Twice have drowned,' we read (the first person being understood), 'thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty.' Eh? 'Twice have drowned, thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty.' I see.

LRB 8 December 1988 | PDF Download