Brodsky died of a heart attack aged 55, at his apartment in Brooklyn Heights, a neighborhood of Brooklyn, a borough of New York City, on January 28, 1996. He had had open-heart surgery in 1979 and later two bypass operations, remaining in frail health following that time. He was buried in a non-Catholic section of the Isola di San Michele cemetery in Venice, Italy, also the resting place of Ezra Pound and Igor Stravinsky. In 1997, a plaque was placed on his former house in St. Petersburg, with his portrait in relief and the words "In this house from 1940 to 1972 lived the great Russian poet, Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky". Brodsky's close friend, the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, memorialized him in his collection "The Prodigal", in 2004.