Anna Akhmatova

Carol Ann Duffy

selected-poems

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more

source_10558

By signing up, I confirm that I'm over 16. To find out what personal data we collect and how we use it, please visit our <a href="/company/about-us/notices/privacy-policy/">Privacy Policy</a>

Keep an eye out for a confirmation in your inbox

Stories, ideas and giveaways to help you spark young imaginations

source_10972

The latest books, activities and tips to help you grow little readers

source_10975

About us

About Us (Header 4)

john-le-carre-a-legacy-of-spies-960-2.jpg

Margaret Atwood

Richard Osman

Malorie Blackman

George Orwell

marian_keyes_mobile_320x200px.png

Elif Shafak

shonfaye

Authors (Header 3)

Books (Header 2)

Company

Features (Header 1)

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Pocket clothbound volumes from the world's greatest poets, and with a stunning range of anthologies. Each volume has an elegant jacket, full cloth sewn binding, silk ribbon marker and headbands, with gold stamping on front and spine and decorative endpapers. In size, price and presentation they make ideal gifts and are a joy to read and collect. More than eighty titles in print.

Anna Akhmatova: Poems

Selected Poems

It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide

Once, when young, she had written the lines which lovers quoted to one another. Later she provided words which thousands of men and women repeated under their breath, as they suffered, feared and waited.

The greatest Russian poetess of the twentieth century

Her fortitude and independence, the breadth of her compassion and the clarity of her realistic vision erased the line between herself and others; her intensely personal lyrics became the void of her nation's tragedy

The extraordinary misery of her life and the extraordinary merits of her poems make Anna Akhmatova one of the great literary figures of modern times

Tragedy did not wither her: it crowned her with majesty...Her life, in Keats's phrase, became 'a continual allegory', its strands interwoven with the story of a people. Indeed, her poems can be read in sequence as a 20th-century Russian chronicle

Her Poem Without a Hero is perhaps one of the greatest poems of the 20th century

A timeless poet of Stalin's reign who more than anyone captured its seething fear and hopelessness

Beautiful, clever... she came to represent the aspirations of so many, putting real flesh on Shelley's aphorism about poets, not tyrants, being the unacknowledged legislators of the world

Her poems always lift me up. She elevates emotions, makes them almost sacred...I always find her a real solace and an incredible inspiration

Not an easy person, but a grand one, and a great poet, described by one of her friends as "trailing behind her an invisible mantle of fame, sorrow, great losses, hurts"

This translation retains all the power that has made her verse so famous both in Russia and throughout the world.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CAROL ANN DUFFY 
 
Anna Akhmatova is one of the most accomplished and well loved poets Russia has ever produced. Her moving and passionate writing has won her an ardent readership all over the world. This selection, beautifully translated by poet and novelist D.M. Thomas, illustrates her broad scope and brilliant imaginative gifts. It covers both her earlier work and the poems she produced during her persecution by the Russian authorities.

A new edition of the selected poems of Russia's greatest twentieth-century poet, published to celebrate her 120th anniversary.

Anna Akhmatova was born on 23 June 1889 in Odessa and grew up in Tsarskoe Selo, the imperial summer residence outside St Petersburg. Her parents separated in 1905 and she moved with her mother and siblings to the Crimea. She published her first poems in 1907. In 1910 she married the poet Nikolai Gumilev, the founder of the Acmeist school of poetry. Her collections of poetry Evening (1912), Rosary (1914), White Flock (1917), Plantain (1921) and Anno Domini MCMXXI (1921) were published to great acclaim. She and Gumilev had a son, Lev, in 1912 and divorced in 1918. Gumilev was executed for conspiracy by the Bolshevik authorities in 1921 and after this Akhmatova was treated as an enemy of the state. None of her poetry was published between 1922 and 1940 and her son was arrested and imprisoned three times between 1934 and 1956. From Six Books was published in 1940 but in 1946 she was expelled from the Union of Writers and her next major collection, The Flight of Time, did not appear until 1965. Anna Akhmatova died on 5 March 1966 and her requiem mass was attended by over five thousand mourners.

Selected Poems

Select a format:

Retailers:

Summary

Reviews

About the author

Anna Akhmatova

More from this Author

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter