She was right, in a way -- too much Brodsky, not enough Akhmatova. Yet if you're a great poet, it can never be too much. And Brodsky was a great poet. America saw him at his most comfortable and well-cared-for, probably at his happiest, but never at his poetic best. The search for meaning -- and for a home -- galvanized his first three Russian volumes: A Halt in the Desert, The End of a Beautiful Era, and A Part of Speech; once he arrived in the US and achieved celebrity status, he became a public figure cut off from his sources of inspiration.

But those first three! Much of A Halt in the Desert was translated by George Kline in Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems (Penguin, 1973; now regrettably out of print) -- including the monumental "Great Elegy for John Donne":

John Donne has sunk in sleep . . . All things beside
are sleeping too: walls, bed and floor -- all sleep.
The table, pictures, carpets, hooks and bolts,
clothes-closets, cupboards, candles, curtains -- all
now sleep: the washbowl, bottle, tumbler, bread,
breadknife and china, crystal, pots and pans,
bed-sheets and nightlamp, chests of drawers, a clock,
a mirror, stairway, doors . . . 

Brodsky was writing on the run: A Part of Speech leaves Russia, glances back nostalgically at Imperial Rome and the Greece of Homer, touches down at Ann Arbor, goes on to Venice, Mexico, Chelsea (in London), Cape Cod, Munich, Florence, England, Venice again. Its jacket displays the lion of St. Mark over an old map of the Venetian lagoon, and indeed floating, cosmopolitan Venice is an apt metaphor for the poet's own rootless denationalized state. "Countries get snared in maps, never shake free/of their net of latitudes," he tells us, and so the jacket itself becomes a metaphor, an anticipation of the Yalta peninsula's melting away from life and "returning to the boundaries/of which our maps incessantly remind us."

But this book's defining metaphor is embodied -- literally -- in its innocent-looking title. For Brodsky, to be human is to be a part of speech; he's looking for the language we're part of. So we get plotted against a paradigmatic/vertical axis (the Word as God) but also against a syntagmatic/horizontal one (since a part of speech cannot function in isolation). The vertical continuum is explicit in "December 24, 1971" ("both a newborn and Spirit that's Holy/in your self you discover"), implicit in "A Christmas Ballad," "1 January 1965," "Anno Domini," "A second Christmas by the shore," and "Nunc Dimittis." Yet sometimes we're disconnected: in "The Thames at Chelsea" the "colorless, vile chirp" of a busy signal is "clearer than God's own voice."

Along the horizontal axis, too, loneliness is pandemic. Brodsky remembers his birthplace as a region where "Only sound needs echo and dreads its lack./A glance is accustomed to no glance back"; later he identifies solitude as "the essence of all things." Many poems haunt the provinces, the periphery, where "The dreams you dream are not of girls half nude/but of your name on an arriving letter"; they seem suspended, all windows and seashores and evenings (there are 10 evenings for every dawn in this book). "San Pietro," the final poem, takes us back to Venice, in twilight, in fog. The poet kicks a tin can and waits for it to hit sand -- or water. At the end he's still waiting.

A Part of Speech runs riot with kaleidoscopic color and surreal energy: silence staring at a parrot; the universe and a Venetian pension sailing side by side into Christmas. "Lullaby of Cape Cod" begins with cicadas falling "silent over some empty lawn" and the tinkle of Ray Charles's piano from the radio of a patrol car; it ends with a school of cod coming one by one to the door and asking for a drink. Still, not even the "queer, vertiginous thought of Nothingness" can buckle Brodsky: "When it's Christmas," he tells us, "we're all of us magi." And with this book he brings us a priceless gift.