Great Regulars: There's a millenarian whiff in the air,

but the final magical little sentence turns rain into hawthorn blossom, and leaves our imaginations with a joyous seasonal imprint after all.

As a further welcome and spring-like prospect, Derek Mahon's New Collected Poems will be published by Gallery Press at the end of April.

The Seasons

For Matthew Geden

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Books blog: Poem of the week: The Seasons by Derek Mahon

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[Lev] Loseff suggests that [Joseph] Brodsky's English, for all its fluency, was not quite up to the nuances of poetry translation. I suspect he might still have been influenced by Auden, whose last poems also veer into awkward slanginess. Or perhaps it was simply a language-game: after all, the poems existed invulnerably in Russian. Brodsky's re-creations may have been the overflow of creative exuberance into reckless play.

The poet's English essays are superb, and "It is hard to resist the notion that a more genuine and true translation of Brodsky's poetic universe into English was his prose and not his poetry".

from Carol Rumens: The Independent: Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life, By Lev Loseff, trans. Jane Ann Miller

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