If a form can be said to have a tendency, poetry seems to want to drift toward the numinous. Fortunately, there are poets who are appalled by this tendency, and who, perhaps recognizing it in their own early work, go on to combat it. Mandelstam, in rejecting what translator Bernard Meares calls the symbolists' "self-indulgent mystical paraphernalia," was, I think, one of these. His poems are earthy, difficult, and anchored in the real, not eschewing even the physics of light. Meares's introduction is helpful. Joseph Brodsky's essay is less so: one is surprised that this is the best a Russian poet, one who clearly values Mandelstam's work, could do.