In the following excerpt, Perloff lauds Akhmatova as a standout female poet who resisted the force of history and the pressure of gender expectations from interfering with her work.

[The Complete Poems of Anna Akhamatova], a bilingual edition, with extraordinary notes, biographies, photographs, illustrations, and facsimile pages, would be a bargain at twice the price. The poems themselves, of which more in a moment, are framed, in Volume I, by a Translator's Preface, in which Judith Hemschemeyer, herself a poet, provides valuable comments on Akhamatova's prosody and stylistic habits, and by the editor Roberta Reeder's 160-page critical biography of the poet, which could easily have been published as a separate book. Then in Volume II, there are further biographical memoirs, this time by Isaiah Berlin and by Akhamatova's protégé, the critic Anatoly Naiman. At the back of Volume II, following a group of 200 uncollected...