Selected Poems

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