Marca de agua

In Marca de agua, a mosaic of fifty-one brief sequences, Joseph Brodsky uses his annual visits to Venice to meditate on the relationship between water and earth, light and darkness, present and past time, time desire and its satisfaction, life and death. Poetic prints, Venetian prints, these reflections on the city open gaps in the memory of the writer, who intertwines personal memories with events that occurred in this city of water, water that, as he himself says, "hits it and breaks it into pieces, although in the end he picks it up and takes it with him until he deposits it, intact, in the Adriatic". That perception and that counterpoint between images and thoughts will be forever associated in the reader's mind with the name of Venice.