Selected Poetry

“Selected Poetry is a modest title, yet the book reaches high. It recounts the poet’s life and works; provides compact, sometimes provocative scholarly commentary for each poem; and glosses every term or name or event that readers might query, thus creating a rich literary, historical and cultural context for individual texts. Wood’s lively translations will not elicit any ripostes that the work is flat. On the contrary, they grasp the irrepressible sense of freedom which is the poet’s hallmark … Pushkin is lucky in Antony Wood. Pleasure is to be found on every page of this book.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“This Selected Poetry by Anthony Wood supersedes all previous translations of Pushkin’s other verse narratives. Wood’s The Bronze Horseman gives us Pushkin at his most tragic. Count Nulin, a witty parody of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece, shows him at his most light-hearted. The Tale of Tsar Saltan — one of Pushkin’s verse fairy tales — bounces along with delightful vitality. Even with the delicately musical short lyrics — still harder to translate — Wood’s success rate is remarkable.”
—Robert Chandler, The Financial Times