After the Arctic

Flew South, still drugged with white sunshine,
dry-skinned, already used to a few streets
between snow slopes, painted wooden
homes, mountains in every window.
We found fresh leaves on birch trees,

damp green of the first chestnut,
yellow blossom, all the tenderness
of English spring. And the next morning
we woke to birdsong, but were ill-tempered,
as if denied an accustomed euphoriant.

Elaine Feinstein's voice is clear, passionate and subtle. She writes about love, loss, jealousy and the pressures of living as mother and wife, drawing coherent shapes out of her own inner uncertainties, tenderly calling up an ageing father, a child on a swing, old films or a flowering cactus. Given her temperament, and her Russian-Jewish background, it is no wonder that her versions of Marina Tsvetaeva are celebrated, and that she brings such understanding to the translation of other Russian Writers - including Margarita Aliger, Yunna Moritz, and Bella Akhmadulina - and to Alexander Pushkin, whose biography she has written. Her landscape poems are always peopled, and the narrative and dramatic skills of a major novelist give an unexpected urgency to her evocation of classical and historic figures.

This Collected Poems and Translations is just that: work drawn from fourteen volumes of poems and translations published over thirty years.