Publisher's Synopsis
`She is an extremely fine poet. She has a sinewy, tenacious way of penetrating and exploring the core of her subject that seems to me unique. Her simple, clean language follows the track of the nerves. There is nothing hit or miss, nothing for effect, nothing false. Reading her poems one feels cleansed and sharpened.'
Ted Hughes.
`Elaine Feinstein is not only among the best readers and translators we have of modern Russian verse. She is a subtle, poignant poet in her own right, and the author of a number of intensely crystallised, allusive fictions that are truly the novels of a poet. The pulse of narrative and of dramatic voice is vivid in her verse. Everything she has published is instinct with caring, with a rare intelligence of pain.'
George Steiner.
Elaine Feinstein is a poet of lyrical directness. That clear, passionate voice which she brought to her celebrated translations of Marina Tsvetayeva's poetry is her own. She writes about love, loss, jealousy, the fear of abandonment. Her powerful rhythms flow down the page, seeking to draw a coherent shape out of the inner uncertainties. She also writes with tenderness about an ageing father, a child on a swing, old films, a flowering cactus. Hers is a poetry which can contain and welcome. The rare landscape poems are always peopled, and the considerable narrative and dramatic skills of a major novelist give urgency to her evocation of the classical figures of Dido and Eurydice. More recently she has found a poignant lyricism in writing of the inhabitants of her local streets and the ordinary pleasures of daily life.
The poems in this generous selection are drawn from eleven volumes published over thirty years.
