Owen declares that her aim was "to turn Baudelaire's French poems into convincing English poems while keeping as close as I could to the original texts." On the whole she seems to me to have succeeded very well in both aims. Her translations give real pleasure as a collection of poems in English. You don't need to be able to read the French facing pages to receive a strong sense of Baudelaire's power.

[...]

Overall, [...] this book has given me a great deal of pleasure. It's an excellent introduction to Baudelaire for the reader who doesn't know him at all, and a valuable addition to the library of someone who does.