Elaine Feinstein

Elaine Feinstein Poems

I still remember love like another country
with an almost forgotten landscape
of salty skin and a dry mouth. I think
there was always a temptation to escape
from the violence of that sun, the sudden
insignificance of ambition,
the prowl of jealousy like a witch's cat .

Last night I was sailing in my sleep
like an old seafarer , with scurvy
colouring my thoughts , there was moonlight
and ice on green waters.
Hallucinations. Dangerous nostalgia.
And early this morning you whispered
as if you were lying softly at my side:

Are you still angry with me ? And spoke my
name with so much tenderness, I cried.
I never reproached you much
that I remember, not even when I should;
to me, you were the boy in Ravel's garden
who always longed to be good,
as the forest creatures knew, and so do I.
...

2.

We first recognised each other as if we were siblings,
and when we held hands your touch
made me stupidly happy.

Hold my hand, you said in the hospital .

You had big hands, strong hands, gentle
as those of a Mediterranean father
caressing the head of a child.

Hold my hand , you said. I feel
I won't die while you are here.

You took my hand on our first aeroplane
and in opera houses, or watching
a video you wanted me to share.

Hold my hand, you said. I'll fall asleep
and won't even know you're not there.
...

When I travel without you, I am no more
than a gaudy kite on a long umbilical.
My flights are tethered by this telephone line
to your Parker Knoll, where you wait
lonely and stoical.

About the Festival: there were no penguins
crossing the road on the North Island,
no whales in Wellington harbour .
The nearest land mass is Antarctica, and
the wind blows straight from there to New Zealand.

Katherine Mansfield lived here as a child.
and I've bought gartered stockings in bright colours
to honour her in the character of Gudrun.
For you, I've bought a woollen dressing gown.
You were always home to me. I long for home.
...

4.

Last night I wondered where you had found to sleep.
You weren't in bed. There was no-one in your chair.

Through every window the white, full moon glared .
I shivered in the garden. Where are you, my darling ?

I called out miserably: You will catch cold .
Waking, I let the daytime facts unfold.
...

The clock's gone back. The shop lights spill
over the wet street, these broken streaks
of traffic signals and white head-lights fill
the afternoon. My thoughts are bleak .

I drive imagining you still at my side,
wanting to share the film I saw last night,
- - of wartime separations, and the end
when an old married couple re-unite - -

You never did learn to talk and find the way
at the same time, your voice teases me.
Well, you're right, I've missed my turning,
and smile a moment at the memory,

always knowing you lie peaceful and curled
like an embryo under the squelchy ground,
without a birth to wait for, whirled
into that darkness where nothing is found.
...

We are keeping an eye on the girls, so that the kvass
doesn't go sour in the jug, or the pancakes cold,
counting over the rings, and pouring Anis
into the long bottles with their narrow throats,

straightening tow thread for the peasant woman:
filling the house with the fresh smoke of
incense and we are sailing over Cathedral square
arm in arm with our godfather, silks thundering.

The wet nurse has a screeching cockerel
in her apron - her clothes are like the night.
She announces in an ancient whisper that
a dead young man lies in the chapel.

And an incense cloud wraps the corners
under its own saddened chasuble.
The apple trees are white, like angels - and
the pigeons on them - grey - like incense itself.

And the pilgrim woman sipping kvass from the ladle
on the edge of the couch, is telling
to the very end a tale about Razin
and his most beautiful Persian girl.
...

in memory of Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)

Does anybody know what it was all for?
Not Private Rosenberg, short as John Keats.
...

Elaine Feinstein Biography

Elaine Feinstein (born 24 October 1930, Bootle, Lancashire) is a poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, biographer and translator. Born in Bootle, Liverpool, Feinstein grew up in Leicester. Her father left school at 12 and had little time for books, but was a great storyteller. He ran a small factory making wooden furniture through the 1930s. She writes "An inner certainty of being loved and valued went a long way to create my own sense of resilience in later years spent in a world that felt altogether alien. I never altogether lost my childhood sense of being fortunate. Feinstein was sent to Wyggeston Grammar School by her mother "a school as good as Leicester could provide". She wrote poems from the age of 8, which were published in the school magazine. At the end of the war Feinstein's sense of childhood security was shattered by the revelations of the Nazi extermination camps. She notes "In that year I became Jewish for the first time". Feinstein excelled at school work from this point. She was educated at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. After Cambridge she read for the bar, worked at Hockerill Training College, then as a university lecturer at the University of Essex (1967–70),appointed by Donald Davie. Feinstein married and had three sons. As she started writing again she "came to life again", keeping journals, enjoying the process of reading and writing poetry, composing pieces to help her make sense of experience. She comments that she wanted "plain propositions, lines that came singing out of poems with a perfection of phrasing like lines of music". She was inspired by the poetry of Marina Tsvetayeva and to her translations (1971) were published by Oxford University Press and Penguin, and she received three translation awards from the Arts Council. Her first novel was written under Tsvetayeva's influence. 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. "Alive to her family origins in the Russian-Jewish daspora, she developed a close affinity with the Russian poets of this and the last century." She visited Russia on occasions to research her books and visit friends which included Yvegeny Yevtushenko. She has written fourteen novels, many radio plays, television dramas and five biographies, including 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 and translated into most European languages including Russian. Feinstein's poetry is influenced by Black Mountain poets, as well as Objectivists. Charles Olson sent her his 'famous letter defining breath 'prosody'. Feinstein has travelled extensively, to read her work at festivals across the world, and as Writer in Residence for the British Council, first in Singapore, and then in Tromsø, 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 was appointed to the Council of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007. 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. Feinstein participated in the 22nd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in November 2010 and continues to give readings across the world.)

The Best Poem Of Elaine Feinstein

A visit

I still remember love like another country
with an almost forgotten landscape
of salty skin and a dry mouth. I think
there was always a temptation to escape
from the violence of that sun, the sudden
insignificance of ambition,
the prowl of jealousy like a witch's cat .

Last night I was sailing in my sleep
like an old seafarer , with scurvy
colouring my thoughts , there was moonlight
and ice on green waters.
Hallucinations. Dangerous nostalgia.
And early this morning you whispered
as if you were lying softly at my side:

Are you still angry with me ? And spoke my
name with so much tenderness, I cried.
I never reproached you much
that I remember, not even when I should;
to me, you were the boy in Ravel's garden
who always longed to be good,
as the forest creatures knew, and so do I.

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