Anna Akhmatova is not only Russia's finest woman poet but perhaps the greatest in the history of Western culture. Selected Poems brings together all D. M. Thomas's acclaimed translations of Akhmatova's poems. It includes Requiem , her poem of the Stalinist Terror which 'belongs to a select number of sacred texts which, like American Indian dream-poems but for more sinister reasons, were considered too momentous, too truthful, to write down'; and Poem Without a Hero , described by Thomas as 'a superimposition of joyous, talented, light-hearted Petersburg upon tormented Leningrad - or vice versa . Akhmatova's love poem to her city'.