Winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature. Joseph Brodsky's second major collection contains poems from the years 1965 to 1978, translated from the Russian. Despite isolation from his native Russian culture and language since becoming an involuntary exile in 1972, Brodsky has inherited the tradition of Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Pasternak. Restrained, sometimes humorous, sometimes brilliantly epigrammatic, his poems possess the serious, unfrivolous wit of his metaphysical forebears.