Watermark, by Joseph Brodsky (Penguin, £6.99 in UK)

Every winter for seventeen years, Russian poet and master essayist Joseph Brodsky visited Venice in order to pay homage to the beauty of this "city of the eye" as much as to revitalise himself. First published in 1992, this personalised travel piece was in fact commissioned by the city patrons. He so memorably celebrated the glorious light which illuminates his native St Petersburg in Less than One (1986), his first collection of essays, that Watermark initially seems vague and haphazard. It is essentially an uneasy mood piece, at times darkly philosophical, its self-absorption countered by the intelligence of Brodksy's observations as well as the prevailing tone of romantic melancholy. Not the best of the 1987 Nobel Literature Laureate who died exactly a year ago, Watermark nevertheless gradually seduces and improves on each reading.