earing the subtitle Silver and Steel, this thick, extraordinary anthology, 20th Century Russian Poetry, fills a long-standing need for greater exposure to the voices of Russian poets--well-known and little-known. Albert C. Todd, a Professor of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literature, Queen's College, New York, quotes Boris Pasternak in the Editor's Introduction:

No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of a forest, it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest until suddenly, in the very darkest, most stunned and panicked moment, it rolls to its end and begins to speak with all the treetops at once.

This book has several helpful addenda. The chronicle table of contents is broken into four segments--Children of the Golden Age: Poets Born Before1900; Children of the Silver Age: Poets Born Before he Revolution; Children of the Steel Age: Poets Born Before World War II; and Children of Omega and Alpha: Poets Born After World War II. A glossary defines words from "kulak" (fist) to "samizdat" (self-published). An Alphabetical Index of Poets is useful too.

The translated works of 253 Russian poets, hand-picked by Yevtushenko, have been brought together in an emotionally, politically and historically powerful collection of contemporary poetry. The poems blaze with what Yevtushenko terms "the Russian national spirit." That spirit has found its way into the 830 poems represented here; much of this poetry was censored by the government and many of its authors were subjected to social persecution. In spite of all the authoritarian impediments and punishments, these Russian poets refused to be controlled or silenced. Yevtushenko and Todd anticipated our need to contemplate the poets' individual histories and have headed each poet's work with a biography. For the most part, they are rich, often terrifying histories.

Stretching from Konstantin Sluchevsky's 1837 birth into 1994, these poets have come from a variety of places from peasant to aristocracy; they were/are bakers, activists, cloth painters, journalists, bookkeepers, farmers, geologists, doctors, sometime-librarians, factory workers. Over a dozen of them died in Soviet prisons, two in Nazi concentration camps. One hundred and one of them were still living in 1994, most of them in Moscow, but a number in the United States. Two short poems by unknown Russian poets are also given space. The entire spectrum of human experience is portrayed in these remarkable poems, but, as Yevtushenko himself says, " . . . there are no objective anthologies."

With scant exception, there is nothing easy about reading these works. It is tough. There is "Refugee" by Ilya Krichevsky, who was killed on the Sadovoye Koltso road in August 1991 putsch: "All my life I've rushed,/ between hell and heaven,/ today the devil, and tomorrow God,/ today exhausted, and tomorrow empowered,/ today proud, and tomorrow I burn . . . / Stop. It is redeeming. We find here no nobler lines than Boris Kornilov's "Continuation of Life": I see far away the horizons of home,/ The harvesters gleaning the wheatlands,/ Moving toward me rolling and sighing,/ They have arrived and I'm happy now to die." Ilya Selvinsky writes about personal loss in "I Saw It": Yet silent I stand over the terrible grave./ What are words? Words are dust./ There was a time I wrote about my sweetheart,/ About the trilling of nightingales." Only a scattering of love poems and a few nature poems lend surcease. It is as though the tender words have flown from the Russian's vocabulary. Still, when a writer's entire societal experience is dominated by paranoia and violence, what else can he or she do but write about and against such cruelties?

One surprise about the book--why is the work of Sophia Parnok, nee Parnokh, (1885-1933) not included? Odd, because her lover, poet Marina Tsvetayeva, is represented. Her exclusion then was not to protest her lesbianism. Parnok's poems have such power: "The sharp fan of my pick shone in the sun,/ around me clumps of earth bobbed up and crumbled,/ a seabreeze blew, the sweat ran down my back/ and cooled, an ice-cold, slender little snake--/ and never had the sweet bliss of possession/ burned through me with such piercing pride/ and unbeclouded fullness." How could she have slipped through Yevtushenko's fingers?

20th Century Russian Poetry is essential to the shelves of poetry devotees. It is a jolting literature written by vision-voiced poets who have something urgent to say. Future anthologies of Russian poetry will be judged by the standard it has set.