PoetryIn an interview with the editor of PN Review, Elaine Feinstein commented on Al Alvarez's The Savage God: "I remember his introduction well. Not for me. If you've escaped the Holocaust entirely by the serendipitous chance of your family deciding not to settle in Germany, and you're conscious of that - as I was from about age nine onwards - you don't look for suicidal risks much.
That's not exciting. Death is not exciting." Feinstein is not a writer to indulge in shrill Plathianism, even when her subjects encompass both bereavement and her Jewishness, as they do in her most recent collection, Talking to the Dead. The addressee of most of these poems is her late husband, Arnold Feinstein, and their tone is intimate and by turns vexed, tender, bereft. As the cover note states quite candidly, "theirs was not an easy relationship", and the poems are lucidly unsentimental in their delineation of the complexities of a long marriage. Variation on an Akhmatova Poem sums it up in nine succint lines:
She drinks to her ruined home.
My own is not destroyed.
Still, the loneliness in marriage
is something I can toast.
I drink to your hostile stare,
our quarrels, your infidelity,
and what you resented most:
that God did not choose to save you,
and took some pity on me.
Such recognitions are counterbalanced by instances of searing loss. In A Visit the speaker remembers love like "another country" from which she is now exiled. It is a disabused recollection: "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".
But the dangerous compromises entailed by love are forgotten with the whisper of her dying spouse:
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.
The poems succeed in their intensity by a complete avoidance of mawkishness, so that the reader feels to be eavesdropping on a conversation between two very affectionate and, by turns, exasperated lovers. There is bravery in such candour, and although Feinstein regularly employs formal devices in her poetry, this is art that conceals art: the effect is always of clarity and directness.
Feinstein's important engagement with the work of Marina Tsvetaeva (her translations of the great Russian poet are truest to the restless scintillation of Tsvetaeva's verse) is apparent in a poem like Marriage, with its elliptical shifts of diction and disrupted syntax:
in fury
we share, which keeps us, without
resignation: tender whenever we touch
what
else we share this flesh we
bring together it hurts to
think of dying as we lie close.
Rather more in style than in subject, there is also perhaps a debt to Charles Olson here, another of Feinstein's acknowledged influences.
The philosophical, elegiac tone of the collection continues in Feinstein's poems about her Jewish heritage. Scattering is a lengthy sequence on the history of the Jewish diaspora, while in another of her apostrophes, the dead addressee is Ezra Pound, whose work she admires. Given his notorious anti-Semitism, that "provincial prejudice" as he dubbed it, this is a complicated relationship also, as she admits: "even while knowing you would casually/ have seen me done for as a child of nine". Nevertheless, this poem is indicative of the capacious humanism of Feinstein's approach: to see life and relationships less in black and white terms than as part of what Stevens called "the whole, the complicate, the amassing harmony". Letter to Ezra Pound even ends on a note of wry complicity: "Socrates warned us/not to trust poets centuries ago". It is indicative of a wisdom and maturity that illuminate the whole of this collection.
Caitriona O'Reilly is a poet and critic. Her second collection, The Sea Cabinet, was published last year by Bloodaxe Books and was a Poetry Book Society recommendation
Talking to the Dead By Elaine Feinstein Carcanet, 57pp. £9.95