Volume 40, Number 9 · May 13, 1993
'Anna of All the Russias'
By John Bayley
The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, Updated and Expanded Edition
translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, edited by Roberta Reeder
Zephyr Press, 908 pp., $24.95 (paper)
Remembering Anna Akhmatova
by Anatoly Nayman, translated by Wendy Rosslyn
Holt, 240 pp., $29.95
In a Shattered Mirror: The Later Poetry of Anna Akhmatova
by Susan Amert
Stanford University Press, 274 pp., $37.50
Poetry must somehow proclaim its authority. However mysteriously this comes about, its achievement can always be recognized; a great poem continues to assert its magisterial spell in the face of all the tyranny or indifference of passing events. When Yeats wrote in 1919, 'The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,' he could not have known that before the end of the century, at a time when convictions of any sort were hard to come by, for both the good and the bad, his words would nonetheless have passed into the language, been stamped on the consciousness of daily speech.
Review, 4141 words
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