The youthful and brilliant Andrei Voznesensky descends as much from Mandelstam, whom he never mentions, as he does from Pasternak and Lorca, to whom he pays eloquent tribute. He is strong (as he needs to be under the circumstances), talented, and in his reach and ambition, capacious. Perhaps this makes him sound too solemn; his work also has about it a touch of Marcel Duchamp, dada, and the Beatles. We now have in English … two new volumes of translations [Selected Poems and Antiworlds]. The drama of Voznesensky's nimble play is there to be observed….

His poems are the dynamic asides of a very private person in a very public place. Who is the audience? Who is the poet? They become one; they incorporate each other. Worlds are energized by their antiworlds…. The poet is an airport, a center of world-communication, into and through which the outcasts of the...