... monologue presumably uttered by the twentieth-century painter David Hockney. But where is the ekphrasis? The given two-in-one invites a search for Hockney paintings, concealed behind the text’s ostensible glances at the medieval painting by Giovanni. A close reading discloses that some Hockney artworks...

... famous quips (not mentioning David Hockney’s unmentionable one),10 Brodsky seems less willing to play along, becoming suddenly sin- cere. Brodsky’s initial face-as-map image—a hybrid of the commonplace “his face was an open book” and Brodsky’s previous “like seeing a land- scape” simile—is much...