Gumilyov has been remembered mainly as the first husband of Akhmatova and for his death at the hands of a Bolshevik firing squad in 1921, when he was 35 years old. His writings were virtually under ban for more than half a century, but these sharply-cut translations by Richard McKane show him to have been a considerable poet in his own right - well worthy of inclusion in the illustrious company of Akhmatova, Pasternak, Tsvetayeva, Khodasevich and so on. Many of the poems have an exotic setting, reflecting Gumilyov's love of travel, others record obsessional love affairs, while others again have a kind of post-Nietzschean exaltation of danger (he fought bravely as a cavalryman in the first World War). His tragic death, apparently on a trumpedup charge, came when Lenin was anticipating Stalin by shredding the ranks of the literary intelligentsia.