SOURCE: Woodbury, Vickie. Review of Three Russian Poets, by Margarita Aliger, Anna Mortiz, and Bella Akhmadulina, translated by Elaine Feinstein. World Literature Today 54, no. 4 (autumn 1980): 301.

In the following review, Woodbury compares Akhmadulina with her contemporaries and concludes that through time her poetry actually decreased in originality.

Elaine Feinstein, a poet and a novelist herself, has brought out one previous book of translations of Russian poetry: the Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, published in 1971. In the present volume [Three Russian Poets] Feinstein has selected nine poems by Margarita Aliger (b. 1915), eight poems by Yunna Moritz (b. 1937) and ten poems by Bella Akhmadulina (b. 1937). She has also written an introduction to her translations in which she discusses briefly the life of each of these poets and offers some general observations on their works. According to her introduction, the selection of three female poets was not determined by their sex, but...