#kolyma tales

[nicklloydnow]

“The mountain had been laid bare and transformed into a gigantic stage for a camp mystery play.

A grave, a mass prisoner grave, a stone pit stuffed full with undecaying corpses of 1938 was sliding down the side of the hill, revealing the secret of Kolyma.

In Kolyma, bodies are not given over to earth, but to stone. Stone keeps secrets and reveals them. The permafrost keeps and reveals secrets. All of our loved ones who died in Kolyma, all those who were shot, beaten to death, sucked dry by starvation, can still be recognized even after tens of years. There were no gas furnaces in Kolyma. The corpses wait in stone, in the permafrost.

In 1938 entire work gangs dug such graves, constantly drilling, exploding, deepening the enormous gray, hard, cold stone pits. Digging graves in 1938 was easy work; there was no "assignment," no "norm" calculated to kill a man with a fourteen-hour working day. It was easier to dig graves than to stand in rubber galoshes over bare feet in the icy waters where they mined gold - the "basic unit of production," the "first of all metals."

These graves, enormous stone pits, were filled to the brim with corpses. The bodies had not decayed; they were just bare skeletons over which stretched dirty, scratched skin bitten all over by lice.

The north resisted with all its strength this work of man, not accepting the corpses into its bowels. Defeated, humbled, retreating, stone promised to forget nothing, to wait and preserve its secret. The severe winters, the hot summers, the winds, the six years of rain had not wrenched the dead men from the stone. The earth opened, baring its subterranean storerooms, for they contained not only gold and lead, tungsten and uranium, but also undecaying human bodies.

These human bodies slid down the slope, perhaps attempting to arise. From a distance, from the other side of the creek, I had previously seen these moving objects that caught up against branches and stones; I had seen them through the few trees still left standing and I thought that they were logs that had not yet been hauled away.

Now the mountain was laid bare, and its secret was revealed. The grave "opened," and the dead men slid down the stony slope. Near the tractor road an enormous new common grave was dug. Who had dug it? No one was taken from the barracks for this work. It was enormous, and I and my companions knew that if we were to freeze and die, place would be found for us in this new grave, this housewarming for dead men.

The bulldozer scraped up the frozen bodies, thousands of bodies of thousands of skeleton-like corpses. Nothing had decayed: the twisted fingers, the pus-filled toes which were reduced to mere stumps after frostbite, the dry skin scratched bloody and eyes burning with a hungry gleam.

With my exhausted, tormented mind I tried to understand: How did there come to be such an enormous grave in this area? I am an old resident of Kolyma, and there hadn't been any gold mine here as far as I knew. But then I realized that I knew only a fragment of that world surrounded by a barbed-wire zone and guard towers that reminded one of the pages of tent-like Moscow architecture. Moscow's taller buildings are guard towers keeping watch over the city's prisoners. That's what those buildings look like. And what served as models for Moscow architecture - the watchful towers of the Moscow Kremlin or the guard towers of the camps? The guard towers of the camp "zone" represent the main concept advanced by their time and brilliantly expressed in the symbolism of architecture.

I realized that I knew only a small bit of that world, a pitifully small part, that twenty kilometers away there might be a shack for geological explorers looking for uranium or a gold mine with thirty thousand prisoners. Much can be hidden in the folds of the mountain.

And then I remembered the greedy blaze of the fireweed, the furious blossoming of the taiga in summer when it tried to hide in the grass and foliage any deed of man - good or bad. And if I forget, the grass will forget. But the permafrost and stone will not forget.” (p. 178 - 180)

[bormgans]

KOLYMA STORIES - Varlam Shalamov (1954-1965, transl. 2018) & TELLURIA - Vladimir Sorokin (2013, transl. 2022)

Two very different books this time, both translated from Russian, both published by New York Review Books, and both collections of short stories of sorts. Telluria is a work of speculative fiction, set in a future Russia. Kolyma Stories is not so fictional, as it is Shalamov’s personal account of his 15 years in the gulag – one of the very few that survived in the system for such a long time. I’m…

[queenlucythevaliant]

Time to share another of my favorite Christian poems with you all. It’s a martyrdom poem by Varlam Shalamov, a victim of the Soviet gulags and also the writer of Kolyma Tales. A few favorite stanza are written out here; the entire poem is typed out below. It’s a little on the long end, but entirely worth it. 

“Avvakum in Pustozyorsk” by Varlam Shalamov

The walls of my church

  are the ribs of my heart;

it seems life and I

  are soon bound to part

 .

My cross now rises,

  traced with two fingers.

In Pustozyorsk it blazes;

  its blaze will linger.

 .

I’m glorified everywhere,

  vilified, branded;

I have already become

  the stuff of legend.  

 .

I was, people say,

  full of anger and spite;

I suffered, I died

  for the ancient rite.

 .

But this popular verdict

  is ugly nonsense;

I hear and reject

  the implied censure.

 .

The rite is nothing—

  neither wrong nor right;

a rite is a trifle

  in God’s sight.

 .

But they attacked our faith

  in the ways of the past,

in all we’d learned as children

  and taken to heart.

 .

In their holy garments,

  in their grand hats,

with a cold crucifix

  in their cold hands,

 .

in thrall to a terror

  clutching their souls,

they drag us to jails

  and herd us to scaffolds.

 .

We don’t mind about the doctrine

  books and their age;

we don’t debate virtues

  of fetters and chains.

 .

Our dispute is of freedom,

  and the right to breathe—

about the Lord’s will

  to bind as he please.

 .

The healers of souls

  chastised our bodies;

while they schemed and plotted,

  we ran to the forests.

 .

Despite their decrees,

   we hurled our words

out of the lion’s mouth

  and into the world.

 .

We called for just vengeance

  against their sins;

along with the Lord,

   we sang poems and hymns.

 .

The words of the Lord

  were claps of thunder.

The Church endures;

   it will never go under.

 .

And I, unyielding,

  reading the Psalter,

was brought to the gates

  of the Andronikov Monastery.

 .

I was young;

  I endured every pain:

hunger, beatings,

  interrogations.

 .

A winged angel

  shut the eyes of the guard,

brought me cabbage soup,

  and a hunk of bread.

 .

I crossed the threshold—

  and I walked free.

Embracing my Exile,

  I walked to the east.

 .

I held services

   by the Amur River,

where I barely survived

  the winds and blizzards.

 .

They branded my cheeks

  with brands of frost;

by a mountain stream

  they tore out my nostrils.

 .

But the path to the Lord

  goes from jail to jail;

the path to the Lord

  never changes.

 .

And all too few,

  since Jesus’s days,

have proved able to bear

  God’s all-seeing gaze.

 .

Nastasia, Nastasia,

  do not despair;

true joy often wears

  a garment of tears.

 .

Whatever temptations

  may beat in your heart,

whatever torments

  may rip you apart,

 .

walk on in peace,

  through a thousand troubles

and fear not the serpent

  that bites at your ankles—

 .

though not from Eden

  has this snake crawled;

it is an envoy of evil

  from Satan’s hand.

 .

Here, birdsong

  is unknown;

here one learns the patience

  and the wisdom of stone.

 .

I have seen no color

  except lingonberry

in fourteen years

  spent as a prisoner.

 .

But this is not madness,

  nor a waking nightmare;

it is my soul’s fortress,

  its will and freedom.

 .

And now they are leading me

  far away in fetters;

my yoke is easy

  and my burden grows lighter.

 .

My track is swept clean

  and dusted with silver;

I’m climbing to heaven

  on wings of fire.

 .

Through cold and hunger,

  through grief and fear

towards God, like a dove,

  I will rise from the pyre.

 .

O far-away Russia—

  I give you my vow

to return to the sky

  forgiving my foe.

 .

May I be reviled,

  and burned at the stake;

may my ashes be cast

  on the mountain wind.

 .

There is no fate sweeter,

  no better end,

than to knock, as ash,

  at the door of the human heart.

[rapid-apathy]

Friendship never arises in a state of deprivation or misery. The “difficult” conditions of life, which writers of fairy tales tell us are a precondition for friendship, are simply not difficult enough. If deprivation or misery ever gave people solidarity and friendship, then the deprivation was not extreme and the misery was not very great. Grief is not acute or deep enough if you can share it with friends.

Kolyma Stories - Varlam Shalamov 

[supersimsstories]

Tale of Three Treasures

DISCLAIMER: I have a habit of feeling bad to invalidate a timeline variant so I just make really weird ways to merge the timelines together

The first part of this story comes from the 3 AGDI remakes of the first three King’s Quest games, and uses years before and after Graham’s coronation (BGC- before graham’s coronation and GC- graham’s coronation).

Due to a scientific revolution in the world that we call ours, humans, influenced by the words of intellectuals bound by their jealousy to those with magic, started to hunt magical beings to test their reality. All found solace in the wise and powerful mage Crispin, who vowed to find a solution. In 1695 BGC, using his magic, he was able to shift the axis of space (all worlds lie on a 2 dimension graph of time and space) and thus create a new world. To aid him to replenish civilization, Crispin drew magic from each star and personified it. He trained them all in magic, and they became The First Mages, from whom all the other mages (e.g. Manannan, Mordack, Hagatha, etc.) are descended from. He soon announced his prodigy, Legenimor, who was born from the North Star, as his successor and King of All the Land.

Legenimor ruled piously after Crispin’s retirement and created treasures to aid him in his rule, naming his serene kingdom, Serenia. This did not stop the other mages from harvesting their jealousy, and waging a war, known as the Grand War. After 715 years of violence, during which Legenimor’s general and younger brother Morgeilen (born from the little star next to the North Star) disappeared, Legenimor decided to end the war completely. In 980 BGC, he hid all his treasures and created one last one, a pair of hands made of emerald, which he held up, and through that, he relinquished his magic back to the heavens from which he was born.

Without his superpower, Legenimor was murdered and the war had finally come to an end. Before he died, Legenimor bewitched the crown of his kingdom to only fit the head of the true king, prompting the advisors to check the head of every figurehead in the court, until it finally fit the head of Grantithor, the farmer turned First Knight of Serenia. He was crowned king and aimed to rule with equality and justice for both the powerful mages as well as the helpless citizens harmed by the war. In honor of the citizens, he erected a well where the first tree in Serenia was planted, coincidentally by Grantithor’s father Dafa. He thus split the continent into half, keeping the western side as Serenia, and renaming the eastern side and the continent as Dafa’s tree, which became Daventry.

Grantithor’s many kids spread to new lands and founded new kingdoms, like Kolyma, Llewdor, Tamir, and more. He then decreed that if the king did not have any biological heirs, the throne should go to the First Knight if they prove worthy. To back up his decree, he married his eldest daughter to his First Knight,  born from the House of Cracker. Their descendants continued to be First Knights to the kings for centuries. The emerald hands, entitled The Item, alongside a green healing orb and the Chest of Gold, an everlasing chest always filled with gold, were buried with Legenimor, but stolen by the pirate, Saren.

In 900 BGC, Grantithor’s great-grandson, King John the Compassionate, accompanied by his second cousin, Sir Robin Cracker, defeated a bandit who, through a series of thefts stemming from Saren, obtained the Chest of Gold.

Legenimor gave his magic shield to the titan Oceanus for protection. Oceanus passed it on to his son, Asopus, who lended it to his daughter Aegina for protection from teh lust of Zeus. She was ultimately kidnapped by Zeus and given her own island, named Aegina, where she gave birth to Zeus’s son and teh first king of Aegina, Aeacus, who inherited the shield and passed it down to his son Peleus. Peleus married the Nereid Thetis, and they had Achilles, who inherited the shield. Achilles and his lover Patroclus were killed in the Trojan War, but were honored by naming the shield the Shield of Achille. For their valor in the Trojan War on the trojan side, Grantithor’s 16x great-grandson, Cassux, and his contemporary First Knight, Sir Polltor Cracker, were given the shield in 520 BGC.

Finally, Legenimor sent his friend Merlin back to our world, with the Magic Mirror, where Merlin died at the hands of his unreciprocated lover, Nimue. in 220 BGC, Grantithor’s 28x great-grandson, King Anthrovale, and his First Knight, Sir Gallevain Cracker, excavated the cave and found Merlin’s coffin, where they retrieved the Mirror.

The Crackers continued to serve the House of DeVentry as First Knight, until a romantic mixup in Llewdor years later...

[uncleweed]

ARUNDHATI ROY

When I was growing up in Kerala, to nourish the English part of my brain—there was a Malayalam part, too—there was a lot of Shakespeare and a lot of Kipling, a combination of the most beautiful, lyrical language and some very unlyrical politics, although I didn’t see it that way then . . . I was definitely influenced by them, as I have been later by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, John Berger, Joyce, Nabokov. What an impossible task it is to list the writers one loves and admires. I’m grateful for the lessons one learns from great writers, but also from imperialists, sexists, friends, lovers, oppressors, revolutionaries—everybody. Everybody has something to teach a writer. My reading can switch rather oddly from Mrs. Dalloway to a report about the National Register of Citizens and the two million people in Assam who have been struck off it and have suddenly ceased to be Indian citizens. Ceased to have any rights whatsoever.

A novel that overwhelmed me recently is Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Just incredible—the audacity, the range of characters and situations. It begins with a surreal description of the Volga burning—the gasoline floating on the surface of the water catching fire, giving the illusion of a burning river—as the battle for Stalingrad rages. The manuscript was arrested by the Soviet authorities, as though it were a person. Another recent read was The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, by Giorgio Bassani. It’s about the time just before World War II, when many Jews in Italy were members of the Fascist Party. The Finzi-Continis are an elite Jewish family who live in a mansion with huge grounds and tennis courts. The book is centered around a love affair between the daughter of the Finzi-Continis and a person who is an outsider to that world as the Holocaust closes in. There is something about the unchanging stillness of that compound, the refusal to acknowledge what is happening, even while the darkness deepens around it. It is chilling and so eerily contemporary. All of the entitled Finzi-Continis end up dead. Considering what happened in Stalinist Russia, what happened in Europe during World War II—one is reading, searching for ways to understand the present. What fascinates me is how some of the people who were shot by Stalin’s firing squads died shouting “Long live Stalin!” People who labored in the gulag camps wept when he died. Ordinary Germans never rose up against Hitler, even as he persisted with a war that turned their cities into rubble. I look for clues to human psychology in Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler, in the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, whom Stalin basically killed, in the poems of Anna Akhmatova and Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov.

[lightdancer1]

Wrapped up the next book:

This book is the first of its kind in English, a full history of the German Democratic Republic/GDR/East Germany from its dawn to its dusk. A measure of the kind of history written is that it begins with the experiences of the founders under the Kaiser, the Republic, and the Nazis.......but the opening scene is of a convinced German socialist digging trenches in Vorkuta, the nastiest and vilest of the Gulag camps and the closest thing the USSR had to a death camp besides its close cousin in location and in mentality Kolyma.

The book, as this opening set of tales indicates, is a fairly unsparing history of East Germany. It provides a broader light on the human reality of what it was to live in one of the most militarized police states in human history, whose major comparative point in the modern world is North Korea. It does not do so by downplaying the oppressive aspects, and further emphasizes that the paranoia and brutality of East Germany's leaders were primarily its own nemesis and where they kept creating problems where there were none.

This is another of those rarities like Tombs' history of the English in covering all the ramifications of a society while not excusing away its more sordid elements, and is a good look at the reality of what it was to live in the Communist brand of modernity.

10/10.

[elektranxtchiios]

ghosts of the tsunami imagery is somehow more graphic than night or kolyma tales tbh i just- such an incredible book through

[mabohstarbuck]

Friendship is not born in conditions of need or trouble. Literary fairy tales tell of ‘difficult’ conditions which are an essential element in forming any friendship, but such conditions are simply not difficult enough. If tragedy and need brought people together and gave birth to their friendship, then the need was not extreme and the tragedy not great. Tragedy is not deep and sharp if it can be shared with friends.

Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

[nicklloydnow]

“Love didn't return to me. Oh, how distant is love from envy, from fear, from bitterness. How little people need love. Love comes only when all other human emotions have already returned. Love comes last, returns last. Or does it return? Indifference, envy, and fear, however, were not the only witnesses of my return to life. Pity for animals returned earlier than pity for people.” - Varlam Shalamov, ‘Kolyma Tales’

[yurucamp]

i remember you once said you liked soviet era literature(?) correct me if i'm wrong! i was wondering which are your favorite, or really any books in general!

yes!!! my favorite author from that period is platonov, i highly recommended his short story "among animals and plants"! all of his short stories are beautiful. i also love shalamov, but his works (the kolyma tales short stories) are intensely painful to read, even considering how notoriously joyless russian literature is

i think you may be familiar already with the classics in the english-speaking world, like one day in the life of ivan denisovich and heart of a dog, which are all worth reading. farewell to matyora also stuck with me, though it (like every text) exists in a complicated political space. the 1983 movie of it, прощание, is quite visually striking 

aand... poets. certainly there are a lot more i could list, but here are two poems from the pre-revolutionary era that i am fond of, one by tsvetaeva and the other by blok

[avesblues2]

and his wife basically confirmed that gulag archipelago is mostly fictional

The gulag archipelago is constructed from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and Solzhenitsyn's own experience as a Gulag prisoner lol and you are stating that from one NY times article from 1974 and commie blogs. His second wife was a vigorous defender of his views and writings. There’s hundreds of other accounts of the gulags if you want to defend communism and say his experience was fiction.

Lynne Viola’s The Unknown Gulag

A journey to the Gulag and back: one survivor's account of Stalin's slave camps by the late Polish-born writer Julius Margolin

Gulag, by Anne Applebaum.

Kolma Tales, Varlam Shalamov

Kolyma: the Arctic Death Camps Robert Conquest

Journey into the Whirlwind, by Evgenia Ginzberg.

With God in Russia, Walter J. Ciszek

Coming Out of the Ice: An Unexpected Life Victor Herman

Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag

The House of the Dead Fyodor Dostoyevsky

So continue to deny what happened like a fool and belittling these people’s suffering.

[sebchalex]

I like real books and often take one on flights, although I must admit I might look like a dinosaur. I like Russian classics. When I started racing in Formula 1, I read War and Peace by Tolstoy and Doctor Zhivago by Pasternak. Other books I have recently read include: The Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov, Orthography by Dmitry Bykov, A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami, and Manual of the Warrior of Light by Paolo Coelho. I have also started reading Demons by Dostoevsky. Sometimes I read autobiographies. When I get tired of serious literature, I read detective novels by Boris Akunin.

Daniil Kvyat (x)

[deadpanwalking]

i picked up olesha's envy earlier this year because you had mentioned it as a favorite, and i fucking loved it -- i think i've gone back and reread the section about the street mirror a dozen times now, it's such fun fantastic prose. are there any other similar hidden gems you'd recommend?

Nobody did it like him—when Aquinas said hominem unius libri timeo‚ he actually meant the man of one book in a hedgehog-knows-one-big-thing way, and that's precisely why Olesha is a fucking menace. I don't know what qualifies as a hidden gem, but if you liked Envy, try Bely's St. Petersburg, Erofeev's Moscow-Petushki, Zoshchenko's Before Sunrise, Sokolov's A School For Fools, Babel's Odessa Stories, Ilf and Petrov's The Twelve Chairs, Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, Sologub's The Petty Demon, Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog, Sinyavsky's A Voice From The Chorus, Voinovich’s The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, and anything by Daniil Kharms.

[artbookdap]

In a corner of the barracks on the lower cots quilts of various colours were spread. To the corner post was wired a burning kolymka – a home-made lamp that worked on gas fumes. Three or four open-ended copper tubes were soldered to the lid of a tin can. It was a very simple device. When hot coals were placed on the lid, the gas heated up and fumes rose along the pipes, burning at the pipe ends when lit by a match. On the blankets lay a dirty feather pillow and on either side of it the players sat, their legs tucked under them. A new deck of cards lay on the pillow. These were not ordinary cards, but a home-made prison deck made with amazing deftness by the local wizards. They needed only paper, a piece of bread (chewed and pressed through a rag to produce starch to glue the sheets together), an indelible pencil stub, and a knife (to cut stencils for the card suits and the cards themselves). Today’s cards were cut from a book by Victor Hugo; someone had forgotten the book the day before in the office. It had heavy thick paper, so there was no need to glue sheets together. A dirty hand with the slender white fingers of a non-working man was patting the deck on the pillow. The nail of the little finger was of unusual length – a fashion among the criminals, just like their gold, that is bronze, crowns put on completely healthy teeth. As for the fingernails, nail polish would unquestionably have become popular in the ‘criminal world’ if it were possible to obtail polish in prison circumstances. - An extract from 'On Tick' by Varlam Shalamov, reproduced in the @fuelpublishing book, 'Russian Criminal Tattoos and Playing Cards' by Arkady Bronnikov - - - #Shalamov #Kolyma #Tales #russiancriminaltattoo #russiancriminal #tattoo #arkadybronnikov #sergeivasiliev #danzigbaldaev #russiancriminaltattooarchive #art #tattoos #tattooed #tattooart #traditional #linetattoo #playingcards #tattooing #cardistry #ussr #soviet #sovietunion #russia #russianprisontattoo #criminaltattoo #handpoke #stickandpoke #photography #fuelpublishing #fueldesign #Repost @fuelpublishing https://www.instagram.com/p/Bvu7JtTn0iO/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=12fmcdbm2pqqi

[dagongreyjoy]

Readings for 2020

I aim to read a book a week, with ten poetry books to be also read along the year. I’ve chosen not to ration along fiction/nonfiction and other lines, except poetry, and just choose whatever I want to read. 

I’ve also excluded academic stuff (at least in my field) from this list. Only 62 left to go!

Main Reads:

The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy by William Gaunt

The Books of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Time’s Traveller’s Almanac edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer

Mythe et Épopée I. II. III. by Georges Dumézil

She-Wolves by Helen Castor

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

Into the Unknown by Alexander Maitland

Inventions of the Middle-Ages by Chiara Frugoni

The Assassins by Bernard Lewis

The Southern Gates of Arabia by Freya Stark

Poetic Edda trans. by Carolyne Larrington

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

Letters from Iceland by W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice 

Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov

Les Bouts du monde by Roger Willemsen

The Face of War by Martha Gellhorn

The Collected Works of Kahlil Gibran

Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andrić

The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade

The Early Romances of William Morris

Feudal Society by Marc Bloch

The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry by Walter Pater

Behind the Wall by Colin Thubron

The Wanderer and Other Old English Poems

Getty Apocalypse

Winchester Psalter Miniature Cycle

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Journaux de Guerre 1939-1948 by Ernst Jünger

Auriez-vous crié "heil Hitler" ? : Soumission et résistances au nazisme : l'Allemagne vue d'en bas (1918-1946) by François Roux

Life of William Morris I & II by J.W. Mackail

The Pre-Raphaelites by Aurélie Petiot

The House of Borgia by Christopher Hibbert

The Prince in Splendour: Court Festivals of Medieval Europe by Richard Barber

The Grasmere Journal by Dorothy Wordsworth

A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World by Robert Bringhurst

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Mani & Roumeli by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Seeds of Change by Henry Hobhouse

The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution by Mark Roseman

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Voyageurs Arabes ed. La Pleiade

The Writer’s Map Huw Lewis-Jones

Coventry by Rachel Cusk

Lesbians Nuns by Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan

The Closed Doors by Pauline Albanese

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

Mrs Bridge by Evan S. Connell

Becoming Eve by Abby Stein

Red Clocks by Leni Zumas

The Pre-Raphaelite Dream by William Gaunt

The Book of Legendary Lands by Umberto Eco

Icelandic Folk Legends by Alda Sigmundsdóttir

Poetry:

Selected Poems of Yevtushenko

Golden Treasury of English Verse ed. by Francis Turner Palgrave

Selected Poems of Edward Thomas

Selected Poems of Wilfred Owen

Selected Poems of Rupert Brooke

Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova

Georgian Poetry 1913-1915

Selected Poems and Songs of Robert Burns

If not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho trans. Anne Carson

The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova