Skip to main content

Poem by Elaine Feinstein

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome the significant poet Elaine Feinstein (pictured) to its pages this Friday. She read for my Oxfam series last year, and then again recently in London at Foyles (with Michael Schmidt), where she launched her excellent and moving new collection from Carcanet, Talking to the Dead. Feinstein was born in Liverpool, brought up in Leicester, and educated at Newnham College, Cambridge.

She has written fourteen novels, such as The Border, Loving Brecht and Dark Inheritance. She has written radio plays, television dramas, and five biographies; one of these, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet, was short listed for the biennial Marsh Biography Prize. In 1993, she was Writer in Residence for the British Council in Singapore, and in 1996 in Tromso, Norway. She was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at Bellagio in 1998. Her novels and biographies have been translated into French, Spanish,German, Italian, Danish, Hungarian, Czech, Hebrew, and Chinese; and her poetry into French, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian. Her versions of the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva were first publishedin 1971, and remain in print from OUP/Carcanet in the UK and Penguin in the USA.

Her poems have been widely anthologised, and two were included in The Oxford Book of English Verse (edited by Christopher Ricks). Her Collected Poems and Translations (2002) was a was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her biography of Anna Akhmatova was published in 2005. The poem below is from her latest collection.

London

For Natasha

A full ginger moon hangs in the garden.
On this side of the house there are no stars.
When I go to bed, I like to soothe myself with
streetlights, lit windows and passing cars.

When my grandchild comes to sleep over
I find we share the same preference.
She doesn't want to draw the curtains either.
'I like to look out on my town, my London...

Have you seen London from above?' she asks me.
'It's like a field of lights.' And her grey eyes widen.
Her eight year old spirit is tender as blossom.
Be gentle to her now, ferocious London.


poem by Elaine Feinstein
from Talking to the Dead (Carcanet, 2007)
reprinted with kind permission of the author
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?
3 comments
Read more

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".
1 comment
Read more

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise
1 comment
Read more