Bilingual edition of selected early poems by Anna Akhmatova from her 1917 collection White Flock.

WHITE FLOCK presents for the first time in English translation a substantial number of Anna Akhmatova's early poems. They are nearly all taken from her third volume of the same title, published in 1917, a book which firmly established her claim to be one of the five major Russian poets in the immediate pre-and post-Revolutionary period, along with Blok, Mayakovsky, Tsvetayeva and Pasternak.It is extraordinary to think that the present book is only the fourth translated volume of her work to have appeared in English since 1969, and the only one devoted almost exclusively to her early work.The poems in WHITE FLOCK have been translated by Geoffrey Thurley, who is already well-known for his critical work and for his translations of the poetry of Sergei Esenin.

Mr Thurley, who contributes a critical introduction, has in this volume accurately reflected both the simplicities of style and the complexities of meaning contained in Akhmatova's best early poetry, qualities that have caused her to be regarded as one of the greatest of modern Russian poets.