Over the years, Venice hasn't lacked its literary memorialists and scene-setters, some of them almost as familiar as Canaletto's paintings. From Ruskin to Mary McCarthy, from Byron to Ian McEwan, from both Brownings to Thomas Mann and beyond, the city has been described, analyzed, apostrophized, employed as backdrop, symbol, analogue and template. It has probably inspired more postcard-from poems than any other city in the world. Indeed, Mary McCarthy called it "a folding picture-postcard of itself."

Joseph Brodsky has already used it in his two sets of "Venetian Stanzas" (1962):

     I am writing these lines sitting outdoors, in winter,
     on a white iron chair, in my shirtsleeves, a little drunk;
     the lips move slowly enough to hinder the vowels of the mother tongue,
     and the coffee grows cold. And the blinding lagoon is lapping
     at the shore as the dim human pupil's bright penalty
     for its wish to arrest a landscape quite happy here without me.
                  —"Venetian Stanzas II," stanza VIII

This winter setting is made plain in Watermark, a brief but also extended bravura performance in prose: Winter is the season when Brodsky likes to visit, and stay in, Venice, reminding him as it does of his own native St. Petersburg. Meditating on and playing with his memories, Brodsky tells one nothing substantial about his life there, or even his reactions to it. It's an exercise in style, full of the "curlicue, sirocco-perused scribblings" of the canals' surface, busy with twirls, diversions and arabesques.

He is taken, for example, to visit a vast and almost totally unfurnished palazzo, owned by the last of a long line of admirals, "no navy man; he was a bit of a playwright, and a bit of a painter," who guides Brodsky through its occluded emptiness; "It felt like an underwater journey—we were like a school of fish passing through a sunken galleon loaded with treasure, but not opening our mouths, since water would rush in." The book has many such playful whimsies, teasing bits of atmospherics in which human beings play only a small part. It is a collection of whatever fancies pass through Brodsky's own largely unpeopled imagination.

Towards the end, Brodsky asserts that "should dreams ever be designated a genre, their main stylistic device would doubtless be the non-sequitur. That at least could be a justification for what has transpired thus far in these pages." Each of Watermark's 48 short sections is a capricious flight into disconnected connections, personal impersonalities ("It is a virtue, I came to believe long ago, not to make a meal of one's emotional life"), adding up to a fragmented kaleidoscope that, shaken, reflects Brodsky's own insouciant, untethered later life as much as it does the evanescence of Venice—though the fragments sometimes hint at his earlier trials.

Only once, describing a visit with Susan Sontag to Ezra Pound's longtime companion Olga Rudge, who unstoppably plays a familiar tune, "her master's voice," does Brodsky allow any acid to leak into his watery reflections. "I think I'd never met a Fascist—young or old; I'd dealt with a considerable number of old Communists, and that's what it felt like in the house of Olga Rudge, with that bust of Ezra sitting on the floor." It's a sharp moment, deeply etched, and it throws into relief the delicate marine and submarine ripples that surround it.

Brodsky's solutions to the problems of Venice (the pollution, the sagging Atlantis) are as whimsical as the rest. Among other things, he suggests "one could try dumping blocks of ice into the canals or, failing that, routinely void the natives' freezers of ice cubes, since whiskey is not very much in vogue here, not even in winter." It's a characteristically frivolous aside in a book which is wintry only in its setting, never in its moods.