Collected Poems in English / Joseph Brodsky, many translators, including Brodsky, 539 pp.

When I started this long book I found Brodsky's poetry challenging but assumed that after a couple of hundred pages I would get better at reading it. Practice makes perfect, but alas, not here.  These works remained challenging until the last page; reading them was like the sensation of squinting at a sign that's too far away to read.  Occasional glimmers of meaning come through but the whole is out of reach.

I didn't waste my time, though.  For one thing, the sheer variety of topics Brodsky treats is astonishing.  There's love:

...sleep's entanglements would put to shame
whatever depths the analysts might;
that when my lips blew out the candle flame,
her lips, fluttering from my shoulder, sought
                                       to join my own, without another thought.

And the Presentation at the Temple:

The Temple enclosed them in forests of stone.
Its lofty vaults stooped as though trying to cloak
the prophetess Anna, and Simeon, and Mary - 

And Mexico:

Good old Mexico City.
Marvelous place to kill an 
evening.  The heart is empty;
but Time still flows like tequila.

And from the almanac-style History of the Twentieth Century (a Roadshow) for 1908:

Also, the first Model T is out
in Dearborn to roam our blissful quarters
trailed by the news that General Motors
is incorporated.  The English Edward
And Russia's Nicholas make an effort 
to know each other aboard a yacht.

Seemingly Brodsky's poetry contains the whole universe; I am glad to have grasped a few of the glimmers.