"Most of the lyrics in this volume are true to themselves as English poems and a nearly astonishing percentage are absolutely faithful, as well, to the Russian originals. . . .The Berlin Wall is as nothing compared to the linguistic boundaries separating East and West. The translations in this volume testify to a long-lasting love affair with these boundaries which has borne rich fruit." --Joseph Brodsky

An old friend told Jon Stallworthy of her flight from war-torn Poland, carrying in her bedding-roll a coverlet she was embroidering for her fiance and herself. Her story bears a curious inverse relationship with that of the 'Lady of Shalott.' Tennysons's patrician artist in her tower, forced to choose between the world and its 'shadows' in her mirror, opts for the world and is destroyed; the peasant artist engages with the world and is sustained by an art that reflects that engagement. The modern story Stallworthy traces over the ghostly outline of the old points a parable about one function...

Witness to the international and domestic chaos of the first half of the twentieth century, Anna Akhmatova (1888-1966) chronicled Russia's troubled times in poems of sharp beauty and intensity. Her genius is now universally acknowledged, and recent biographies attest to a remarkable resurgence of interest in her poetry in this country. Here is the essence of Akhmatova - a landmark selection and translation, including excerpts from "Poem with a Hero."

Initially published in 1990, when the New York Times Book Review named it one of fourteen -Best Books of the Year, - Judith Hemschemeyer's translation of The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova is the definitive edition, and has sold over 13,000 copies, making it one of the most successful poetry titles of recent years.

This reissued and revised printing features a new biographical essay as well as expanded notes to the poems, both by Roberta Reeder, project editor and author of Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet (St. Martin's Press, 1994). Encyclopedic in scope, with more...

Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) had a life that spanned prerevolution Russia, Bolshevism, and Stalinism. Throughout it all, she maintained a restrained, graceful, yet muscular style that could grab a reader by the throat, or the heart, at a moment's notice. Her themes include romantic yearning and frustration, the pull of the sensory, the emotional power of the mundane, and her belief that a Russian poet could only produce poetry in Russia. By reputation, both Akhmatova's poems and the poet herself are defined by tragedy and beauty in equal measure, and she is for many the quintessential...