SOURCE: "Between Two Worlds," in The New York Times Book Review, April 14, 1996, p. 14.

In the positive review of On Grief and Reason below, Kenner praises the title essay of the collection, stating that it is "probably the best piece ever written on the poetry of Robert Frost."

The vital information: Joseph Brodsky was born in 1940 and came to the United States in 1972 as an involuntary exile from the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and was Poet Laureate of the United States in 1991 and 1992. He died early this year. The essays and lectures collected in On Grief and Reason are mostly post-Nobel. A writer, then, who spent nearly half his life immersed in a language he hadn't grown up speaking.

That can be enabling; the example of Samuel Beckett in Paris comes to mind, or of Joseph Conrad in London. Conrad, who'd grown...