The Complete Poems of Louis Daniel Brodsky: Volume Three, 1976-1980

Book excerpt: The third volume of The Complete Poems of Louis Daniel Brodsky presents over seven hundred poems, written from July 1976 through December 1980. By this period in his life, Brodsky had a wife and two children, a thriving business that kept him traveling, and a passion for acquiring Faulkneriana, sparked by his deep appreciation of the author's literature, that had led him on increasingly frequent journeys to Oxford, Mississippi, and elsewhere, to meet those who knew Faulkner and those who might supplement Brodsky's expanding collection. Spending considerably more time away from home than ever before, he began to compose most of his poems while driving, eating in small-town caf , staying in motels, and retreating to bars after twelve-hour workdays, always filling his omnipresent notebook with new images and metaphors. It was during these trips that Brodsky conceived many of his poetic personae: Willy Sypher, the Jewish ragman road peddler; a man who, though he lost no family in it, still feels he's a victim of the Holocaust; the Northern outlander, who appears in many of his "Southern" poems; the nature poet, who captures the beauty of rural America, and the cynical city poet, who observes its bigotry and vulgarity; and the unhappy family man, who feels he must escape home, for the freedom of the open road, but nevertheless suffers guilt and remorse. The poems from this segment of Brodsky's literary career reflect a man, in his mid and late thirties, facing growing desperation as he attempts to fulfill the complex responsibilities of his day-to-day commitments and yet address an unrelenting compulsion to record his frenetic life, in verse.