This original anthology traces a century of Russian poetry, taking us through the turbulent decades from 1900 to 2000 with poets of stature who reflected or recorded their times. It combines work by famous and lesser known (outside Russia) poets, some never previously published in English, through the medium of six translators, who also contribute biographical and historical notes.

The one unnamed poet is the writer from the Arsenal Mental Prison Hospital in the 1970s, whose anguished, affecting verse, in a little book bound in elastoplast, was smuggled out of the hospital. These are poems that will continue to survive.

The translators: Vladimir Baskayev, Kitty Hunter Blair, Belinda Cooke, Richard McKane, Michael Molnar.

Richard McKane is the translator of the `Selected Poems' of Anna Akhmatova (1989) and, with Elizabeth McKane, of Osip Mandelstam's `The Moscow Notebooks' (1991) and `The Voronezh Notebooks' (1996). More recently he has published a selection from Nikolay Gumilyov's poems, `The Pillar of Fire' (1999) and, with Ruth Christie and Talât Halman, a selection of poems by Nâzim Hikmet, `Beyond the Walls' (2002).