NEWSLINK The Observer (UK): The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry review – the importance of rhyme and reason. An ambitious anthology spanning 200 years is welcome – though some of the translators need to work on their rhyming

This anthology is ambitious – in scope, biographical apparatus and in what it expects of its translators. Although the chronological arc is shorter than that of the granddaddy anthology, Dimitri Obolensky’s The Penguin Book of Russian Verse (1965), which included medieval oral poetry and a pair of important 18th-century literary writers, Lomonosov and Sumarokov, the present editors generously r