To Urania.

To Urania, by Joseph Brodsky (Farrar, Straus, 160 pp., $14.95)

WHAT HAS happened to Joseph Brodsky, last year's "winner of the Nobel Prize for literature," as the jacket of his new collection, To Urania, so proudly declares? A Part of Speech, his preceding volume of verse (in between, there appeared a fine book of essays, Less Than One), was unmistakably poetry, whether or not one liked a particular poem or even the book as a whole. (I did.) To Urania, however, is-with the exception of a couple of short pieces at the beginning-all opaque maunderings in tormented English or, worse yet, doggerel. You can't even blame it on the Nobel Prize, which came later. If I believed in that prize (I don't), I would ask that Brodsky's laurels, or epaulets, be removed. The next collection could proclaim, "Winner of -the Devil's Island Award for poetry."

It pains me to write this. Poets are born, the ancient saying goes; orators are made. But orators, at least, stay orators; poets, it seems, can also be unmade. Consider, for instance, two poems about Lithuania, both dedicated to Thomas Venclova, a Lithuanian litterateur. In the earlier volume, we got "Lithuanian Divertissement" (1971), which begins:

A modest little country by the sea. It has its snow, an airport, telephones its Jews. A tyrant's brownsione villa A statue of a bard is there as well, who once compared his country to his girlfriend

Not a great beginning, perhaps, but not a bad one, either. The second strophe contains a regrettable solecism, ,,ftom whence," but this could be blamed on the translator, Alan Myers. (Brodsky's poems, if not written in English, as some of them latterly are, are translated by various hands, sometimes in collaboration with the author, and sometimes by the author himself) But the third strophe is true poetry:

Noonday in springtime. Puddles,

hanked-up clouds,

stout, countless angels on the gables

of countless churches. Here a man

becomes a victim of the jostling crowd

or a detail of the homemade baroque

Is there a more direct, pregnant, and poetic way of saying that today's Lithuanian is condemned to choosing between Communism and living in the past? Here now is a typical passage from "Lithuanian Nocturne" (1974), in the present volume, as translated by the author:

. . . A lane gnashes, gumlike, its

porches agleam; like a simpleton's cheese, alley's yellow

is eaten

by the fox of the dark hours. Avenging its permanence, a place stuffs time with a tenant a

lodgerwith a life-form, and throws up the

latch.

And an epoch away I still find you in this dog-eared

kingdom of cudgel forests, plains, well-preserving ones

features, one's thinking and such,

but above all, the pose.in her many-miled, damp hemp nightgown, in her high- voltage

curlers, dormant Mother Lithuania's taking her

rest by the shore, as you're gluing your

plump

lips to her bare and colorless

glassy half-liter breast

That the light of a lane should be the cheese of the fable, coaxed out of his victim's mouth by the fox of darkness, seems like a good image until you realize that Aesop's and La Fontaine's victim is a raven, much more identifiable with the dark than is a fox, and the image suffers. But how does a place "avenge its permanence" (and isn't it impermanence that needs avenging?) by stuffing time with a tenant? And why does this tenant become, contiguously and redundantly, a lodger? And what about that dreadful line break "permanence, a / place"?

Now take the "dog-eared kingdom of cudgel forests"; surely the mind expects congruence between the wound and the weapon. But cudgels do not dog-ear you; they do far worse. Or is the relationship different? What, then? "Well-preserving" is pleonastic and unEnglish; "one's thinking and such" is bathetic. Brodsky likes to inject the conversational into his poetry, but there's a limit. In any case, "such" seems to be here for the rhyme, or slant rhyme, with "latch," just as the tautological "lodger" was there partly for the sake of "cudgel." Rhyme, incidentally, is Brodsky's bane. I applaud his love of it and refusal to relinquish it for the sake of current fashions, but it must never displace, as he so often lets it, elegance, grammar, sense.

"Damp hemp nightgown" grates on the ear with its out-of-place nearrhyme. "High-voltage curlers" is an aborted image. I suppose it's a reference to high-voltage frontier fences, but it suggests cosmetic suicide, the State inducing its accidental demise for aesthetic reasons, which is absurd. Why should friend Venclova's lips be repellently "plump," except, again, for the rhyme? The "glassy half-liter breast" suggests, of course, a bottle and, probably, not mother's milk so much as escape into drunkenness. Either way, Mother Lithuania becomes synecdochically reified as a glass bottle, while earlier parts of the trope convey a living woman asleep in nightgown and curlers. It was Brodsky's mentor, protector, and idol, W. H. Auden, who once warned me about the need for consistency in imagery; here, too often, the image changes horses, or vehicles, in midstream.

I have not singled out the worst part of this longish poem (typically, "Nocturne" runs nine and a half pages, whereas "Divertissement" checked in at three: verbosity, turgidity, elephantiasis are progressively afflicting Brodsky's verse); elsewhere in it, we read of a threat to "what has been lived through with a raid, or perhaps vice versa." Vice versa? A threat to what has been raided with a life? Surely not. Or Mother Nature is being charged by a jay "with the crime of thermometers: with zerocide." Of course "zerocide" doesn't work linguistically: it is not the first halt the zero, that is being exterminated-as in genocide, fratricide, etc. And why should the merely recording thermometer be charged with the crime? That is a kind of hypallage, the transferred epithet. But the figure of speech works only when the transference is to something larger, as in "a sleepless night" or Eliot's "forgetful snow."

Take, if you will, another unfortunate "whence" in "That's whence, Thomas, the pen's/ troth to letters," here, to be sure, without a "from," but still in an unidiomatic construction and saddled with an awful jingle. "Troth" is only obsolescent; elsewhere, Brodsky lapses into outright archaism. And there is much, much more that is deplorable throughout this poem.

But I haven't picked the worst piece in the collection, either; disaster runs riot in poem after poem, stanza after stanza, often line after line. My space being limited, you may want to check this out in a bookstore; but most of To Urania, including the title poem, is distressingly of a piece. In "Ex Voto," a 1983 poem written in English, we read "An angel resembles in the clouds a blond/ gone in an Auschwitz of sidewalk sales." This is particularly painful coming from a Jewish poet who was imprisoned and, later, expelled by the Russians.

Or what of this, from a 1987 poem about a fly, where the "buggie" (Brodsky's own, ghastly and ambiguous word) leaves the pages of an open book, "and-misprints abhorring- / fast you'd be soaring . . ." which is something out of a pop-song lyric. The next, enjambed stanza runs: "Now, though, since your eyesight lessens,/ you spurn those black-on-white curls, tresses,/ releasing them to real brunettes, their ruffles,/chignons, thick afros." All this just to convey lines of print, which is not what the poem is about. This is Gongorism or Marinism at its rankest. Well, second-rankest.

What, I repeat, has happened to Brodsky? First, he now indulges in what the English eighteenth century called "wit writing," i.e., writing with the wit (archaic for intellect) only, without true feeling or inspiration. Second, the desperate cleaving to rhyme has often yielded doggerel. Third, the hankering for "significant" long poems has produced ponderous longueurs. Fourth, a new love affair with obscurity erects unclimbable barriers. Fifth -and saddest, if true-the muses appear to be forsaking him. Never mind Urania; I'm thinking of the more relevant ones: Erato, Polyhymnia.