Written across a series of winter visits to Venice, Watermark is Joseph Brodsky’s book-length essay on a city that resists being reduced to scenery.

Brodsky builds Venice through weather, water, architecture, memory and the solitary consciousness moving among them. The city becomes a machine for thinking about beauty, decay, time and the strange intimacy between a place and the person who repeatedly returns to it.

Written in English by the Russian-born poet, the book moves through brief, numbered sections whose images accumulate less like argument than tide. Brodsky can be imperious, digressive and occasionally pleased with his own severity, but the prose has the compression and visual exactness of poetry. Venice is not romanticised so much as treated as matter under pressure: stone reflected in water, civilisation rehearsing its disappearance. For readers interested in literary travel writing, cities as forms of consciousness, and essays whose real subject emerges indirectly, through atmosphere and recurrence.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993 first paperback edition, later printing. Paperback with cover rubbing, edge wear and light creasing.