Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0932440509, Paperback)

Anna Akhmatova, one of the great poets of the twentieth century, has, like all Russian poets, proved difficult to translate. In these distinctive versions of a broad selection of her work, the translators have captured her plainness and directness while searching out an analogue to her music in the careful and subtle music of American free verse, especially as founded by Pound, Williams, Moore, and H. D. The result is not a replication of Akhmatova's style, but a complement to it that often startles and gratifies with a starkness and beauty all its own. These exquisite translations convey the subtle beauties and daring associations of a poet whose long life proved poetry's capacity for survival and subversive resistance to tyranny.