<!--<p class="category">Biography -- Literary Criticism--> <p>Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) is unquestionably the greatest poet to emerge from postwar Russia and one of the great minds of the last century. <p> After his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1972, Brodsky transformed himself from a stunned and unprepared émigré into, as he himself termed it, "a Russian poet, an English essayist, and, of course, an American citizen." <p> In interviews from 1972 to 1995, <I>Joseph Brodsky: Conversations</I> covers the course of his exile. The last interview dates from just ten weeks before his death. In talks, he calibrates the process of his remarkable reinvention from a brilliant, brash, but decidedly provincial Leningrad poet to an international man of letters and an erudite Nobel Prize laureate. <p> Brodsky's poetry earned him a Nobel, and his essays won him awards and international acclaim. This volume shows that there was a third medium, in addition to poetry and essays, in which Brodsky excelled--the interview. Although he said that "in principle prose is simply spilling some beans, which poetry sort of contains in a tight pod," he nevertheless emerges as an extraordinary and inventive conversationalist. This volume includes not only his notable interviews that helped consolidate Brodsky's international reputation but also early and hard-to-find interviews in journals that have since disappeared. <p>Cynthia L. Haven is a literary critic at the <I>San Francisco Chronicle</I> and a regular contributor to <I>Times Literary Supplement</I>, the <I>Los Angeles Times Book Review</I>, the <I>Cortland Review</I>, and <I>Stanford Magazine</I>. Her work also has been published in <I>Civilization</I>, the <I>Washington Post</I>, and the <I>Georgia Review</I>.