Boris Pasternak is best known in the West for his epic novel Doctor Zhivago, whereas in Russia he is most celebrated as a poet. The two poetry collections offered here in translation are chronological and thematic bookends, and they capture Pasternak's abiding and powerful vision of life: his sense of its beauty and terror, its precariousness for the individual, and its persistence in time--that vitality of being with which he is on familiar and familial terms.

In the early work My Sister Life, which commemorates the year 1917, Pasternak, then in his late...