Womack gives us an essential Mayakovsky: 'A Cloud In Trousers', 'I Love', a film scenario, a play, agit-prop, love poetry, public and private verse. The great poet of the Soviet era remains a great enigma.

This book is the only single-volume anthology in English that fully represents the scope of Mayakovsky's artistic work. It includes new translations of his major lyrics, as well as versions of several poems that have never been translated into English before. The predominant image presented in earlier translations and anthologies, of Mayakovsky as a hectoring, ranting poet, is replaced by a more nuanced figure, a writer whose apparent egotism is rather a means of dealing with a hostile world by fitting himself to its size.