Poetry. Translated from the Russian by Frank Reeve and Margo Shohl Rosen. Anatoloy Genrikovich Naiman, poet, novelist, critic and literary translator, was born in 1936 into a family of followers of Tolstoy. Having studied as an engineer, he became one of the Leningrad group of young poets (including his friend Joseph Brodsky) around Anna Akhmatova, whose literary secretary he became from 1962 until her death in 1966, and about whom he wrote the invaluable and popular memoir, Remembering Anna Akhmatova. In 2001 two of his novels were shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize. Naiman's work as critic, memoirist and translator (of Leopardi, Provencal poets, and T. S. Eliot, among others) has often eclipsed even his own poetry. LIONS AND ACROBATS--a selection of work from his first four books of poetry in Russian--displays, for the first time in English, the full breadth of Naiman's poetic output.