"Anna Akhmatova began writing in the years before World War I, a time when, according to Akhmatova herself, "to think of a woman as a poet was absurd." Her genius would rise above categorization, but this biography makes clear how heavily she paid for the political and personal passions that informed it. A fierce poise, forged by Anna's lonely childhood, carried her through her father's resistance to her writing - which prompted her to change her name from Gorenko to Akhmatova, a name taken from a Tartar ancestor - and her flawed but passionate love affairs. We see Akhmatova's work banned from 1925 until 1940, and banned again following World War II, when the Union of Soviet Writers labeled her "half nun, half harlot." We see her steadfast resistance to Stalin during her hopeful but unsuccessful attempt to win her son's release from prison. We see her abiding loyalty to such friends as Mandelstam, Shostakovich and Pasternak as they faced Stalinist oppression.

The story of a Berlin cabaret singer, Frieda Bloom, and her love for Bertolt Brecht, set amidst the seedy violence of Weimar Germany. Told by Frieda, the story moves from the collapse of the Weimar, through the years of terror in Moscow, to America at the time of the McCarthy trials.

Elaine Feinstein is a poet of lyrical directness who writes with tenderness about an ageing father, a child on a swing, old films, a flowering cactus, and with insight about love, loss, jealousy, and the fear of abandonment. The poems in this expansive collection are drawn from 11 volumes published over 30 years.

Elaine Feinstein's voice is clear, passionate and subtle. She writes about love, loss, jealousy and the pressures of living as mother and wife, drawing coherent shapes out of her own inner uncertainties. This collection is drawn from 14 volumes of poems and translations published over 30 years.

This a story about decisions, and the difficulty making them, as Hitler's power spreads across Europe. It is told through linked diaries, letters, interviews and poems, which portrary the three main characters as they pursue their own love story to its end. Across their obsessions, the figure of Walter Benjamin, first in Paris, then at the Spanish border, adds a poignant dimension to their hopes and fears.

Elaine Feinstein has always written most passionately about people. In this intimate collection, she remembers friends she has loved, writers she knows, and literary figures from the past. She writes of the Russian poet Bella Akhmadulna with tender admiration; the East End poet Emanuel Litvinoff, at work in his Bloomsbury flat; and Masha Enzenberger, who brought Feinstein into the Russian world of Marina Tsvetaeva. Feinstein imagines Raymond Chandler, Isaac Rosenberg, and Sylvia Plath, and she delights in Joseph Roth's melancholy wit and Disraeli's nerve. There are a few sardonic self-portraits as well. In the last poem, "Death and the Lemon Tree," she finds a compelling image for the privilege of continuing to write into old age.

Evokes old loves, intense friendships, literary ghosts, and a lifetime in the landscape of the 20th century. The poems in this collection try to draw a coherent shape out of inner uncertainties. Carcarnet also publish Elaine Feinstein's "Selected Poems".