A genius of Russian poetry
Sunday Times

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.
Observer

The greatest Russian poetess of the twentieth century
Joseph Brodsky,

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
New York Times Book Review

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
Economist

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
Stanley Kunitz, poet,

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

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

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
Sunday Telegraph

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

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'
Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Times

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