NATION IN BRIEF : WASHINGTON, D.C. : Soviet Emigre Is New U.S. Poet Laureate

Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky, who was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972, was named as the new poet laureate at the Library of Congress in Washington. Brodsky, 50, a professor of literature at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts, on Sept. 1 will assume the position created by Congress to honor the nation’s leading poets. Brodsky was popular in Soviet underground literary circles before he was sentenced to a labor camp and later forced to emigrate. Most of his work has appeared only in the West and has been translated into at least 10 languages.