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. As well as mapping out the development of his life as a poet, from the surrealism of his early pre-Revolutionary work to the more doctrinaire, more 'useful' poetry he wrote from his position as the pre-eminent Soviet poet of the 1920s, it includes other writings--play-scripts, film scenarios, advertising slogans--to give a full description of just how important a figure Mayakovsky was, not just for Soviet poetry, but for the worldwide culture of Modernism as well. 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.