Louis Daniel Brodsky has written and published thousands of poems through his many years of writing in and around St. Louis and elsewhere in his home state of Missouri, and every few years, he collects many of the best of them in published books. In recent months, he has published three outstanding and eclectic volumes of poetry which once again prove his wide range of interest, his keen intellect and insights and his often biting sense of humor.

In 1995, Brodsky celebrated his love and expertise for the Nobel Prize winning Southern writer William Faulkner in a superb and memorable collection called Mississippi Latitudes, part of a trilogy paying tribute and homage to his literary hero.

Brodsky had amassed one of the largest collections of works by and about Faulkner, which he generously donated to Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. Brodsky also wrote a biography called William Faulkner: Life Glimpses . In his poems, he confesses a poignant ambivalence about the redneck rural values not only of the Old South, but of the rural regions of Missouri, their cafes, truckstops and down-home, casual racism and anti-Semitism that peppers their conversations and sausage links.

In The Capital Cafe , Brodsky celebrates his affection for rural values in an affecting, affectionate manner.

Brodsky is a graduate of Yale University with a bachelor of arts magna cum laude; of Washington University with a master’s degree in English and another master’s in creative writing from San Francisco State University. By 1989, he had already published 14 volumes of poetry and nine volumes of scholarship on William Faulkner. He told the St. Louis Jewish Light at the time that his inspiration was “To write lyrical, narrative poems in the old, high, rhetorical style of Milton’s Paradise Lost , with a touch of Dr. Seuss mixed in for good measure.”

Brodsky lives up to his inspiration consistently, whether he is writing scholarly pieces on Faulkner, love poems, or affectionate poems about his traveling salesman in his excellent and moving “Willy Poems.” The horrific events of Sept. 11 inspired him to publish in 2002, Shadow War: A Poetic Chronicle of September 11 and Beyond , four volumes of poetry in which he powerfully expresses an entire range of emotions, including anger, outrage and utter disbelief. They still make for compelling reading, six years after 9/11.

His most recent collections, all published by Time Being Books, and all available in affordable paperbacks, are: A Transcendental Almanac: Poems of Nature ; Combing Florida’s Shores: Poems of Two Lifetimes and Showdown With a Cactus: Poems Chronicling the Prickly Struggle Between the Forces of Dubya-ness and Enlightenment, 2003-2006 .

The range, diversity and contrasting themes of these three books reflects Brodsky’s intellectual curiosity, appreciation of the beauty of nature and his satirical skills in assessing politics in contemporary America.

A Transcendental Almanac invites the reader through “a one-year span of the seasons, inviting you to linger in each month’s four poems. Beginning in April, with nature exultantly proclaiming its freedom from hibernation, and ending, the following March, after the cyclical passing of summer, autumn and winter, the book evokes an intimacy with the flora and fauna, the life and essence of the world’s elemental existence,” says a description of the book’s goals. Brodsky delivers magnificently with a series of splendidly crafted poems, matching the mood changes in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons . An example in A Transcendental Almanac , is this gem titled “Snowy Elopement”

Sunday morning is a diagonal snowstorm,

A wind-song investing me with divinity,

Energy that reminds me I’m alive outside in its whiteness,

By releasing me from gazing inward,

Pressing deep, toward the core of my slumberous brain,

Where imagination usually sleeps by day.

The snow effects a sensuous paradox,

Relieves me of the necessity to fend for myself,

Suspends me in its earthward surge,

As though I were a flake taking my chances on eternity

Or instantaneous effacement.

Sunday and I, in white, recite the vows of man and sky.

In Combing Florida’s Shores , Brodsky describes his work as “a poetic memoir. Part one depicts a man, his wife and their girl and boy reveling in the joys of vacationing in Fort Lauderdale. The second section chronicles the now-divorced man returning to his old haunts, with a new love, to find that everything and nothing is the same.” That prose description almost reads like poetry, combining philosophy, wisdom, and a bittersweet understanding of the transitory nature of events and the inevitability and painfulness of change.

In “Full Circle” in Combing Florida’s Shores , Brodsky movingly writes:

Not so much a minivacation

Or hiatus from daily labors

As a visitation

Is this short stay, at Point of Americas II,

With my octogenarian parents,

This trip reminiscent of my first forays to Florida,

In the mid 1940s,

When, on doctor’s orders, they brought me —

Their “sickly kid” of five, six, seven —

To winter in Hollywood and Boca Raton,

Take doses of sun and love, gain my strength…

Reminiscent with this difference:

Now, time finds them, not me,

Resigned to tiny acts of sublime indolence,

Savoring their precious energy,

As they enter the late stages of their second childhood,

Finds me, their son, their loving parent.

The above, as poetry, evokes Philip Roth’s moving account of caring for his aging and ill father in his non-fiction work, Patrimony. It is a testament to Brodsky’s skills that in just a few lines he can accomplish what a brilliant novelist needs a book to communicate.

Showdown With a Cactus is strikingly different from the above two Brodsky books. Like many great literary figures such as Arthur Miller, Brodsky cannot resist using his writing skills to discuss all aspects of human activity, including the aftermath of 9/11 and in the present book, he focuses his biting wit on the foibles of George W. Bush and the modern era of American politics. No matter if you are a Bush-basher, who would probably love the book just for its cover and title, or a supporter of “Dubya,” reading Brodsky’s humorous take is bound to bring a smile to your lips. The late Molly Ivins, as a loyal daughter of Texas, perhaps skewered George W. Bush best by calling him “Shrub” in contrast to “Bush Senior.” But Brodsky’s poems are often just as much on the mark as pure, Mark Twain-style humor.

The following opening to “Our Emperor’s New Clothes” in this collection provides an excellent sample of Brodsky’s biting wit and deft satirical ability:

Oh, how insistent our emperor is on persuading us

We’re a people united against an invisible enemy,

A country engaged in a war on terrorism

Engendered by a festering, insidious disdain for Westerners,

Ignited by an invidious cult of Islamic firebrands….

…..

These last three years have been a petri dish

In which our culture’s denial has flourished.

We go about our lives, our business, with bouyant spirits,

Not dragging paranoia around on a leash.

So why do we admire our emperor’s new clothes?

Brodsksy does not provide an answer to his provocative questions he often poses in the above and other poems in these three superb collections. But he does ask the right questions, leaving it to his readers, whose intellect he always respects and never insults, to find their own way, their own understanding of the truth. And that is poetry at its best!