"Osip Mandelstam has become an almost mythical figure of modern Russian poetry, his work treasured all over the world for its lyrical beauty and innovative, revolutionary engagement with the dark times he lived through during the Stalinist era. It was while exiled in the city of Voronezh, the black earth region of Russia, that his poetry, as Joseph Brodsky wrote, transformed into "a poetry of high velocity and exposed nerves.becoming more a song than ever before, not a bardlike but a birdlike song, with its sharp unpredictable turns and pitches, something like a goldfinch tremolo." The eminent Scottish translator Peter France has been translating Mandelstam's work for decades, but only now has offered it to readers like a divine gift in Black Earth: Selected Poems and Prose. France has drawn heavily from Mandelstam's later poetry written in Voronezh, while also including poems across the whole arc of the poet's tragically short life, from his early, symbolist work to the haunting elegies of old Petersburg to his defiant "Stalin poem." A shimmering section of Mandelstam's prose-memoirs of his Petersburg childhood, extracts on his Jewish inheritance, sunlit Hellenism, Dante's Tuscany, the centrality of poetry in society-irradiate the poetry with warmth and insight"--.