A collection of poems in translation from Russia, Greece, Turkey, Sweden, Czechoslavakia and the Mediterranean. Nineteen Russian poets and seven Turkish poets are represented, and the writers include Pasternak, Mandelstam, Akhmatova and Aranzon.

Osip Mandelstam was one of the great Russian poets of the 20th century, with a prophetic understanding of its suffering, which he transformed into luminous poetry. Childish and wise, joyous and angry, at once complex and simple, he was sustained for 20 years by his wife and memoirist Nadezhda Mandelstam, who became, with Anna Akhmatova, the saviour of his poetry. The Moscow Notebooks cover his years of persecution, from 1930 to 1934, when he was arrested for writing an unflattering poem about Stalin, and subjected to gruelling interrogations and torture. The Notebooks include that fatal poem - with its clinching line 'His cockroach moustache laughs, perching on his top lip' - and present a shattering portrait of Moscow before the Great Terror. He attempted suicide twice, slashing his wrists in prison, and jumping from a hospital window. Exiled to Voronezh, he seemed crushed. A friend described him then as 'in a state of numbness. His eyes were glassy. His eyelids were inflamed, and this condition never went away. His eyelashes had fallen out. His arm was in a sling.' But it was to be four more years before Mandelstam was completely beaten. In Voronezh he broke a silence of 18 months, writing the 90 poems of the three Voronezh Notebooks. Nadezhda's memoir Hope Against Hope includes a moving account of their time in Voronezh, and Anna Akhmatova's poem 'Voronezh' describes her visit there in 1936, when 'in the room of the exiled poet / fear and the Muse stand duty in turn / and the night is endless / and knows no dawn'. With an introduction by Victor Krivulin, this edition combines the two previous separate editions of The Moscow Notebooks and The Voronezh Notebooks published by Bloodaxe.

This comprehensive edition of Russia's greatest modern poet, Anna Akhmatova (1899-1966), includes the complete texts of her major works Requiem, commemorating all of Stalin's victims, and Poem Without a Hero. Akhmatova published her first book of poems in 1912, and in the same year founded the Acmeist movement with her husband, the poet Gumilev. Her intense, highly personal love lyrics were later attacked as anti-revolutionary, and in 1925 her poetry was banned. Gumilev was shot in 1921 for alleged involvement in an anti-Bolshevik plot, and in the years of terror which followed under Stalin, Akhmatova was persecuted for her work along with fellow poets Mandelstam, who died in a camp, and Tsvetaeva, who committed suicide. She was able to publish some work during the war, but in 1946 she again came under attack, this time from Zhdanov, who denounced her with Pasternak and others for trying to 'poison the minds' of Soviet youth. These were attacks on her published work. What she was writing - but could not publish - was far more dangerous. For she had entered her years of silence. As she fought for her son's release from prison, she was writing her greatest poetry: the cycle Requiem, which commemorated all of Stalin's victims, and Poem without a hero, which she began in 1940 and worked on for over 20 years. All she wrote she committed to memory. Several trusted friends also memorised her poems, among them Mandelstam's widow Nadezhda. She wrote nothing down, and so survived, the people's conscience, the one who kept 'the great Russian word' alive.

Fate's Little Pictures is a bilingual poetry pamphlet by Larissa Miller, published by Arc Publications. Larissa Miller (b. 1940) is a major Russian poet and essayist, a member of the Union of Russian Writers since 1979, and of Russian PEN since 1992. Author of 23 books of poetry and prose, she was short-listed for the State Prize of the Russian Federation in Literature and Art in 1999, and in 2013 was awarded the Arseny and Andrei Tarkovsky Prize. Her autobiographical novel Dim and Distant Days was published in English translation by Glas in 2000, and a volume of selected poems entitled Guests of Eternity was published by Arc in a bilingual edition in 2008. A further bilingual poetry pamphlet, Regarding the Next Big Occasion, was published by Arc in 2015. Larissa Miller is also a teacher of English, and of a musical gymnastics system for women named after its creator, the Russian dancer Lyudmilla Alexeeva. She is married, with two sons, and lives in Moscow with her husband Boris Altshuler, a physicist and human rights advocate.

"Flags" was the only volume of poetry published by the Russian emigre poet Boris Poplavsky (1903-1935) during his own lifetime. A significant Surrealist volume, it is one of the 'lost' creations of a man who has been called the greatest of the Russian emigre poets. Now recovered by Russian literary experts and re-edited for a new public, Poplavsky is gaining the readership that eluded him in his lifetime. Unusually, this book presents the complete contents of the original volume ("Paris", 1933), rather than presenting a Selected or some other overview, and thus opens a window onto a fascinating and unfairly neglected figure.

Having many times refused to have his own poetry published, noted translator Richard McKane has (at the urging of Peter Levi and Isaiah Berlin) finally agreed to release a volume of his work.