Wonderful imagery! ( )

Lovely. Stark. Accuracy of the image. Had heard Akhmatova's name before but never read her – the name stuck with me because of who had held a newly-arrived copy in her hand during my bookstore days. Fifteen years or more later I found this slim volume at a book fair, and picked it up as much for that memory as for Akhmatova's name itself.

Twenty short, mostly lyrical love or love-gone-awry poems that can cut the way the winters she describes cut during a deep breath – precise, vital, and painful. There's moments when these tiny poems imply the scope and sweep of the Russia, pre- and post-revolution, that we know from Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Pasternak, within the intensity of a short, personal cry of love or – and – anguish.

You can read through these poems twice in an hour's time, with extra time for lingering on the best of them. Going back afterwards to Jane Kenyon's introduction (the poet half of the poet-translator team for this book) is well worth it, although I'm glad I waited until after the poems for explanations. But Kenyon's decision to (according to her) sacrifice the perfected meter and form of Akhmatova's poems for the perfected image seemed to fit what I'd just read, and not having time to learn Russian, I'll simply trust her for now, track down more Akhmatova, and see what's translation, what's Akhmatova. For now, I'm glad to have found, read, and written down myself to remember, the final stanza of the poem “Like a white stone in a deep well . . .” (that's the first line - few of these poems have titles):

I remember how the gods turned people
into things, not killing their consciousness.
And now, to keep these glorious sorrows alive,
you have turned into my memory of you. ( )