A Part of Speech, by Joseph Brodsky (Oxford Poets, £9.99 in UK)

Brodsky, a Nobel Prize winner, died in 1996 aged 55, in exile from Russia where originally he had been one of the new generation that gathered around Akhmatova in her old age. This collection of poems consists largely of translations from the Russian, some by Brodsky himself but most of them by other hands, though he generally "oversaw" and presumably revised their efforts. Residence in America also made him confident enough to risk writing original poems in English, as in the El- egy for Robert Lowell. This is an important book by an important poet, who was both intensely Russian and a natural cosmopolitan.