SOURCE: "Brodsky's Venice," in Partisan Review, Vol. LXI, No. 2, Spring, 1994, pp. 325-27.

In the positive review of Watermark below, Weisburg discusses Brodsky's metaphorical treatment of Venice.

Since the publication of his 1986 collection Less Than One, Joseph Brodsky has continued to develop his mastery of an idiosyncratic form that defies literary genre. Brodsky's prose pieces superficially resemble familiar or critical essays, but they lack the clarity and analytic pointedness one expects from those forms. Willfully opaque and meandering, they often leave more music and texture than the sense of an argument understood. Their structures invisible, Brodsky's nonfiction writings veer often into aphorism and apostrophe, as they mine autobiographical and philosophical veins tenuously related to the topic at hand.

So it is with Watermark, a slim volume whose intent seems not so much to propound a thesis as to complicate and deepen an intellectual relationship, creating dazzling plays of metaphor...