Collected Poems and Translations

Elaine Feinstein's voice is clear, passionate and subtle. She writes about love, loss, jealousy and the pressures of living as mother and wife, drawing coherent shapes out of her own inner uncertainties, tenderly calling up an ageing father, a child on a swing, old films or a flowering cactus. Given her temperament, and her Russian-Jewish background, it is no wonder that her versions of Marina Tsvetaeva are celebrated, and that she brings such understanding to the translation of other Russian Writers - including Margarita Aliger, Yunna Moritz, and Bella Akhmadulina - and to Alexander Pushkin, whose biography she has written. Her landscape poems are always peopled, and the narrative and dramatic skills of a major novelist give an unexpected urgency to her evocation of classical and historic figures.

This Collected Poems and Translations is just that: work drawn from fourteen volumes of poems and translations published over thirty years.