Journeys and Joy, Pain and Pleasure.


For more than 50 years, Elaine Feinstein has quietly stockpiled her diverse literary energies, which continue to glow like a constantly burning bush of inspirations, athwart the contemporary wastes of near-universally officialised Philistia. Her latest book of poems, Cities (Carcanet, £9.95), amounts to a colourfully revealing snapshot album of her physical and mental travels around the globe and through history.While recalling how ‘All my grandparents came from Odessa / a century ago’, she watches today's migrants ‘arrive in London with battered luggage,’

holding fast to old religions
and histories, remembering
the shock of being hunted in the streets,
the pain at leaving their dead
in broken cemeteries, their resilience
hardwired as birds' skill in navigation.

Feinstein's fecund relationships with beloved fellow poets  - as with Ruth Fainlight (whose New & Collected Poems are to be released imminently by Bloodaxe) in Lisbon, Janos Pilinszky in Budapest, Miroslav Holub in Prague – are delicately evoked. But what strikes me hardest in this sequence as in its predecessors, is her unflinching realism in the face of the heavy costs of creativity: ‘the pain waiting on the next page for me’,

The blank of betrayal which would
rapidly scoop out my life and release
the blood flow of poetry.