THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 24, 1996 TAG: 9603210589
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY PIERCE TYLER
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
ON GRIEF AND REASON
ESSAYS BY JOSEPH BRODSKY
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 484 pp. $24.
On Jan. 28 the world lost one of its most celebrated literary heroes. Joseph Brodsky - Russian exile, Nobel laureate and U.S. poet laureate - died in his sleep at the age of 55.
The fact that his passing went unnoticed by so many in the United States indicates how little regard our culture today has for its poets. The same cannot be said of Brodsky's native Russia, where the mourning is likely to continue for some time to come.
Fortunately, Americans curious to learn more about Brodsky now have On Grief and Reason, a collection of his recent essays and speeches. The works gathered here provide an engaging introduction to the poet's preoccupations.
Based on the title, one might assume that this is a morbid, or at the very least, melancholy series of essays. But such is not the case. Brodsky's themes are far more lively and varied than the title suggests.
In the memoir ``Spoils of War,'' for example, we get a view of the vibrant Soviet youth culture that thrived during the Cold War in Brodsky's hometown of St. Petersburg.
He describes how his generation grew up tuning its shortwave radios to the music of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker and the other jazz legends of the day.
But the ``greatest spoils of war,'' according to Brodsky, were the prewar Hollywood action films that featured brave, individualistic heroes pitted against the omnipresent forces of evil.
``The Tarzan series alone, I daresay, did more for de-Stalinization than all Khrushchev's speeches at the Twentieth Party Congress and after,'' he writes.
Brodsky's early love for things American carried over into his later scholarly endeavors. The title essay in the collection offers an extended close reading of one of Brodsky's favorite poets, Robert Frost.
The essay dwells on the craft of Frost's narrative poem, ``Home Burial,'' about the grief a couple feels on having to bury their child.
Ironically, of all the works in the collection, ``On Grief and Reason'' is one of the least accessible and least memorable. Several other pieces would be more deserving of the title spotlight.
A better choice might have been ``Uncommon Visage,'' the text of Brodsky's 1987 Nobel lecture. Here Brodsky argues for the preeminence of poetry among the forms of human expression.
He also crystallizes his credo of the individual: ``Regardless of whether one is a writer or a reader, one's task consists first of all in mastering a life that is one's own, not imposed or prescribed from without, no matter how noble its appearance may be.''
The collection contains other speeches. Two notable examples are the witty and wise college commencement addresses, ``In Praise of Boredom'' and ``Speech at the Stadium.''
The latter, delivered in 1988 at the University of Michigan, includes a recipe for right living that could well become a classic in the literature of advice to the young.
Another entry of interest is Brodsky's open letter to Czech President Vaclav Havel. Titled simply ``Letter to a President,'' Brodsky addresses Havel as one writer to another on the subject of their shared experience of totalitarian repression.
And finally, perhaps the most revealing text is the autobiographical travelogue, ``After a Journey, or Homage to Vertebrae.'' In this essay Brodsky sketches memories of disillusionment and an affair that occurred during a 1970s literary tour of Brazil.
Though the narrative is amorphous and rambling, Brodsky manages to hold the form together, in the process redefining the limits of the travel essay.
On Grief and Reason is Brodsky's second essay collection. His previous collection, Less Than One (1986), earned him the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. MEMO: Pierce Tyler teaches composition and literature at Old Dominion
University in Norfolk. by CNB