Cities

Description

Cities is a book of travels, from Basel to Budapest, Tampico to Tiblisi - and from the child in wartime Leicester to a 'fortune beyond any deserving / to be still here' in a London garden, eight decades later. 'Migrations', the book's opening poem, celebrates the recurring 'filigree of migration, symbiosis, assimilation'. Inheriting 'a long history of crossing borders', Feinstein explores the haunted landscape between past and present, public history and personal memory, in simple intense lyrics.

Elaine Feinstein was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She has worked as a university lecturer, a subeditor, and a freelance journalist. Since 1980, when she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she has lived as a full-time writer. In 1990, she received a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, and was given an Honorary D.Litt from the University of Leicester. Her versions of the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva - for which she received three translation awards from the Arts Council - were first published in 1971. She has written fourteen novels, many radio plays, television dramas, and five biographies, including the critically acclaimed A Captive Lion: the Life of Marina Tsvetaeva (1987) and Pushkin (1998). Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (2001), was shortlisted for the biennial Marsh Biography Prize. Her biography of Anna Akhmatova, Anna of all the Russias was published in 2005. Elaine Feinstein has travelled extensively, not only to read her work at festivals across the world, but to be Writer in Residence for the British Council, first in Singapore, and then in Tromso, Norway. She was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at Bellagio in 1998. Her poems have been widely anthologised. Her Collected Poems and Translations (2002) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. She has served as a judge for the Gregory Awards, the Independent Foreign Fiction Award, the Costa Poetry Prize and the Rossica Award for Literature translated from Russian, and in 1995 was chairman of the judges for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Elaine Feinstein has made the juncture between poetry and memoir her own. As befits a poet who is also a master of fiction and biography, she writes with casual erudition and an acute storyteller's eye. Her forays into European culture and history are dazzling. Cities is a profoundly humane, intimate exploration of the places and stages by which a life acquires meaning. Fiona Sampson Cities presents itself as the work of old age, but readers expecting regret or renunciation will be surprised by the affirmative character of this book. While Elaine Feinstein revisits Europe in the aftermath of Nazism, she also praises the good fortune of having lived richly in the sphere of literature and travelled widely among remarkable people. The poems here are lit with striking clarity - things retain their outline and solidity to an unusual degree. Sean O' Brien The strangeness of visited cities, with their fearful histories, has been transmuted here by the responses of a truly gifted poet. Dannie Abse