SOURCE: A review of The Collected Poems 1952–1990, in World Literature Today, Winter, 1992, pp. 156-57.

In the following review, Brodsky provides a thematic and stylistic overview of the contents of The Collected Poems.

The new Collected Poems 1952–1990 reflects Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poetic career in microcosm: vast and uneven, sometimes irritating, often appealing, and ever astonishing in its variety. The title is somewhat misleading, since the volume offers only a selection from Yevtushenko's extensive oeuvre, and in addition, several long poems are represented in excerpts only. Yevtushenko's allusiveness can be a problem for Western readers; a few names and terms are explained in footnotes, but this practice could profitably have been expanded. A helpful feature is the chronological list of poems with their Russian titles, date and place of first publication, and location, if any, in the 1983 Sobranie sochinenii (see WLT 59:4).

Like the poems themselves, the translations by twenty-five translators vary...