Book 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.
'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 '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
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. Her poems have been
widely anthologised. Her Collected Poems and Translations (Carcanet,
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.
