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‘’Joseph Brodsky was Joseph Brodsky’’ by Lyn Coffin: book review




‘’Joseph Brodsky was Joseph Brodsky’’ (2017) is a wee book of poems, and a ‘quixote reminiscence’ essay on Joseph Brodsky.

With time, Collins has forgotten many things, but the delightful telling of what she does remember about Brodsky, is both informative and entertaining. 

Josephy Brodsky was a Russian poet (1940-1996) who moved to America in 1972, after he was ‘strongly advised to emigrate.’ Hence he was a poet in exile. Brodsky received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 for "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity."

Collins was his teaching assistant for two years in the 1970s at Ann Arbor, Michigan. Collins, an American graduate student at the University of Michigan, is now a lecturer, translator and poet, with 19 published books. She teaches Literary Fiction in the Continuing and Professional Education Division of the University of Washington. She holds an honorary doctorate from the World Academy of Arts and Culture (UNICEF) for “poetic excellence and her efforts on behalf of world peace.”

‘’Joseph Brodsky was Joseph Brodsky’’ was published by Levan Kavleli Publishing in Tbilisi, Georgia, as part of their Mosaic of World Poetry. There are 23 of her poems in this collection.

Most of the poems are about herself – and even to herself. She reminisces – when she was a child (such as The Ox), and when her son was a child (Gorilla of Love; The Good Question). Her poems are open and honest, stream-of-consciousness and structured, full of wit or humour or irony or nostalgia. They are about fact and fantasy and dreams.

For example, The Good Question, is about the author (unstated) at the ages of 6, 12, 18, and 24, and then when her son was six years old – asking the question, ‘What is poetry?’

Mad, Mad, Mad: a one-page essay on American politics is a poem in four parts: MAD#1 to MAD#4, which is both funny and thought-provoking – ‘mad is as mad does, which is lots and lots of damage.’

Collin’s poems are about daily life events, but rich with emotions. This 77-page booklet (in 4’’x 6’’ format) can be read quickly in an hour, or slowly over a life time.

http://lyncoffin.com




MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).


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