Portraits

Elaine Feinstein

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781847772152
• eBook ISBN: 9781847774965
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Elaine Feinstein has always written with most intensity about people. In this book, she remembers friends she has loved, writers she has known and literary figures from the past. She writes of the Russian poet Bella Akhmadulina with tender admiration; the East End poet Emanuel Litvinoff, at work in his Bloomsbury flat; and Masha Enzensberger, who brought Feinstein into the world of Marina Tsvetaeva. As she imagines Raymond Chandler, Isaac Rosenberg or Billie Holiday her words about them say things about herself. In the closing poem, Death and the Lemon Tree', she finds a compelling image for the privilege of continuing to write into old age.

Portraits

Courting Danger

for Bella Akhmadulina

Those red sea urchins, Bella, on a platter of ice

alarmed me. Their spiky skins had to be

cracked open like chestnut cases, the creatures

still alive inside. Did I dare to broach them?

We were eating in Paris, somewhere near the Bastille.

You must have known that to dine with editors

from Kontinent was risky, but you’d spent

your life flirting with Soviet danger:

other writers lost pensions, ration cards, freedom

and some their lives for milder infringements

but mostly you avoided punishment,

and lived flamboyantly as Queen of Moscow.

In the West, émigré admirers bought champagne

and Sevruga caviar. These I shared greedily,

though your beauty made me dumb.

I could not ask if you still shook with a fever

that broke thermometers and appalled your neighbour,

or whether the gentle spirit of rain pursued you

into the houses of rich Party members

who urged you closer to the fire

as once a mob would have dragged you

into the flames as a witch. Perhaps that Yelabuga

you invented – whose eggs you threatened

to crush under your heels in payment

for Marina’s death – took her own revenge

one day when her yellow eyes swivelled

towards you, hearing the tone of your laughter.

Or maybe she decided she could wait until,

many years later, she would find you

sick and blind, and could move in for the kill.

April Fools’ Day

i.m. Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918)

Does anybody know what it was all for?

Not Private Rosenberg, short as John Keats.

A nudge from Ezra Pound took him to war,

to sleep on boards, in France, with rotting feet,

writing his poetry by candle ends.

His fellow soldiers always found him odd.

Outsiders do not easily make friends,

if they are awkward – with a foreign God.

He should have stayed in Cape Town with his sister.

Did he miss Marsh’s breakfasts at Gray’s Inn,

or Café Royal? He longed for the centre

though he was always shy with Oxbridge toffs –

he lacked the sexy eyes of Mark Gertler –

and his Litvak underlip could put them off.

‘From Stepney East!’ as Pound wrote

Harriet Monroe, while sending poems to her.

He died on April Fools’ Day on patrol.

beyond the corpses lying in the mud,

carrying up the line a barbed wire roll

– useless against gunfire – with the blood

and flesh of Death in the spring air.

His was the life half lived, if even that,

and the remains of it were never found. We remember:

the iron honey gold, his cosmopolitan rat.

Life Class: A Sketch

In Paris, perhaps. On wet cobbles,

walking alone at night, fragile

and wispily dressed, Jean Rhys,

without a sou, past streets

of lit cafés to a meeting place.

Cold t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Portraits
• Death and the Lemon Tree
• About the Author
• Also by Elaine Feinstein from Carcanet Press
• Copyright