Spanning 3,500 years and forty literary traditions, this volume brings forth a rich and varied body of work by women poets, some familiar to the English-speaking reader, but many others long neglected or virtually unknown outside their respective countries. An introductory note on each poet tells something of her life and of the historical and literary context in which she wrote. The poems themselves—approximately four hundred in number and translated from languages as diverse as Byzantine Greek, Sanskrit, Old French, Hindi, Gaelic, Vietnamese, and Maori—cut across the barriers of time and culture to take their rightful place among the wealth of the world's literature. (Penguin Books) 'In America, as everywhere else, women have been and are among our major poets, and here they all are, the familiar elbowing the exotic in endless variety of form, subject, temperament. From Sappho to Judith Wright—by way of Li Ching-chao, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Emily Dickinson, and Anna Akhmatova—this anthology can be read straight through as a dizzying world tour, and returned to as a solid work of reference' —Ellen Moers, author of Literary Women