SOURCE: Bamforth, Iain. “Playing the Roman.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5035 (1 October 1999): 25.

In the following review, Bamforth offers a generally positive assessment of What the Twilight Says.

Commenting on Joseph Brodsky's poems in this, his first collection of critical prose—considerations of writers such as Frost, Naipaul, Hughes and Heaney, along with more meditative pieces best described by the subtitle given one of them as “fragments of epic memory”—Derek Walcott declares that “every poet has a particular twilight in his soul.” Hackneyed it may sound, but Walcott's twilight shifts a lot of symbolic freight. It is a “metaphor for withdrawal of Empire and the beginning of our doubt” it is Baudelaire's crépuscule—“the tropic bug in the Paris fog”; it is the poet's mixed heritage, antithesis and ambivalence, “the pause / between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace” it is the spirit-level of the races, languages and...