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- Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
Elaine Feinstein's poems are the harvest of a lifetime in literature. This selection, made by the author herself, gathers work from over half a century of published writing, and is completed by a section of new poems. The selection ranges from early poems of feminist rebellion and tender observation of children to elegies for the poet's father and close friends, reflections on middle-age, the conflicts in a long marriage, and meditations on the lot of refugees. In new poems Feinstein records her treatment for cancer, her feelings of dread in the clinic and unexpected moments of 'extravagant happiness'. The exploration of memory is at once a source of ironic amusement and an acknowledgement of human transience.
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ELAINE FEINSTEIN
The Clinic, Memory
New and Selected Poems
Contents
New Poems
Hair
How can I reassure my dismayed self in the mirror
as a hank of hair comes away in the comb?
The stuff is soft and pale, as if from a days-old baby,
and the shorn face looking back from the glass
reminds me of those bewildered French women
with scalps exposed and features suddenly huge
whose heads were shaved for sleeping with German soldiers.
My hair loss is only the common response
to chemicals which enter the blood searching out
cancer cells that have escaped surgery.
Nothing hurts. I don’t feel ill. I simply sit
here, in my white pod, listening for beeps.
With what insensate vanity did I once give my age
with such precision as the years went by
as if to invite astonishment? Dunbar had Pride
lead in his ‘Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins’
with wild demeanour – bonnet on one side –
I must be one of her progeny.
Once I was a witch on a bicycle with two small boys
late for school, holding on to me tightly,
my tangled hair trailing behind as I pedalled.
Did I know I was happy then?
I was young at least, and commuting a hundred miles
daily – though still behind with the mortgage.
And we loved the huge house we couldn’t afford, the raspberry
brambles and wild roses in the garden,
our library where my first poems took shape –
the terracotta ceiling and sanded floor, where
young poets often came to sprawl and talk of their
messy lives, and the erotic charge
of American poetry, or hearing Jeremy Prynne
as he paced the floor, allowing us all to share
Aristeas’ vision of nomadic tribes and their purity
we all believed in – at least as he spoke of it.
Less innocent intoxications: London days,
floating in wanton drift away from home,
listening at Better Books or drinking in pubs
on Charing Cross Road with Andrew Crozier
– beautiful boy, and effortless lyric poet – the litter
of whose lines aroused my own.
Long gone, those days. And now, my bushy hair.
I go to buy a woolly hat against the cold
and a glamorous wig from Notting Hill. Once there,
I stare through the glass window at shelves
of plaster dollies with tiny features, each face
as splendidly null as Tennyson’s Maud.
Even before entering I hate them all. I refuse
to think beyond the months of treatment to come.
A curly white fur now covers my head. Some like it.
I’m not sure, though I’ve junked the wig,
and today coming back from the hospital in sunshine
through Regents Park, I watched
the branches of bare trees catch November gold
and was suffused with extravagant happiness.
Mirror Talk
Is that my mother now behind the glass, looking
dark-eyed and weary, as if doubting
whether I can be trusted to count pills,
check blood sugar, or put lancets
into a sharps box? She is reproaching me,
a child too often lost in songs and stories. I know
mine was to be the life she never lived,
the one she imagined as a gentle girl,
a rich man’s daughter in an office job,
with older brothers at university. She never dared
to flout her crabby father as her sister did.
My father loved her smile,
she loved his working-class ebullience
but they married late,
and I was their only child. Mother,
in middle age, you explained unhappily
(I wanted a brother)
how Rhesus-negative blood made you miscarry,
and later babies died and left you ill –
there could be no children after me.
I turned away from your shyness and delicacy –
so slender-wristed, slim fingered,
all your shoes size three – not seeing the stamina
you needed to live alongside
my father’s euphoric generosity, his drama
of disaster and resilience or how his laughing
indulgence stole my love
while you read school reports, met teachers, dabbed
my chickenpox at night, feeling
it was always to him I turned in adoration.
When Cambridge against the odds welcomed me in,
a Midlands Grammar School girl
with some talent but no self-discipline,
always lacking worldly common sense
you mistook my precocity for ambition,
but I was only a wistful dreamer. A contender
needs focus and direction.
I muddled on, loving the wrong men, until
married and bearing a third child I heard
your sigh: ‘I thought you were going to be so clever!’
I did not emulate my uncles’ lives, spent graciously
in serving public good,
their pleasure: clubs, fine meals, and cultured friends.
Mother, forgive me, I did all I could.
They won position. I wrote poetry.
Delusions of the Retina
In winter I can invent a double-decker bus
out of a red lorry and two lit windows
or walking in rain, see car headlights
grow insectivorous feelers
tangled leads to the computer trick me
into thinking I have found my reading glasses
but today spring touched the street magnolia
into blossom, and now like a girl
with wet feet and muddy skirt I hurry
to welcome another year into my garden.
Battleground
These Dunkirk victories of old age:
another year, another
late spring. I’m back from hospital,
I’ve learned to walk without a stick
feel safe in the shower, and open
the front door when I can’t see the keyhole.
Crossing a road remains perilous
but if I pause beside
a neglected garden, yellow roses
smell of Summer, and new leaves soften
the poplars’ stubby branches,
last year’s pollarding forgotten.
So I rejoice in the seasons of the mortal
even as I let myself imagine
this local war is one I am going to win.
Loving Don Quixote
Even now I love you, gentle Knight
of the Rueful Countenance,
because I have always fallen most deeply
in love with vulnerable men –
not losers exactly, but dream-led searchers,
driven by a mad need to excel –
boldly pursuing glory in second-hand clothes
or – like my father, who left school at twelve –
wearing his top hat in the President’s box.
Yet they were nobler than the world they entered,
their poor decisions readily now forgiven
as we forgive children who contrive
to seek honour without calculation
simply to make sense of being alive.
The Impossible Rescue
My love, I dreamed of you again last night.
We were exploring our old home
in Cambridge – Park Parade, I think –
the details fade – but towards daybreak
you called my name out from another room
calmly at first, then urgently
as if you were hurt and being brave:
Hurry, Elaine, soon it will be too late!
I dragged myself out of sleep to respond
but once awake
understood: there is no one now to save.
Betrayal
A response to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116
Get over it, get a life, my friends implored me,
sure that revival lay in moving on.
Yet some bond held me like a tie of blood,
as inescapable as the loyalty
formed in my father-adoring childhood.
I could go anywhere now you were gone
but everywhere else was where I felt alone.
Was that need for you – love?
There are harsher words. Cowardice is one,
another, pride. I never could get rid of
my spoilt child’s sullen grip on a possession –
I could not give up what once held us together:
our bodies’ casual tenderness –
our sleep’s embrace become a natural tether.
dispelling loneliness,
we both found home in a shared family nest
and our licensed disorder.
Could I abandon that long happiness?
Visits from old lovers easily
stirred sexual memories but I confess
none of them could arouse me:
at best, they felt somehow irrelevant.
I would not fake excitement,
I waited – though the rejected rarely win.
Let’s have no reassurance:
When you came back, of course I let you in –
and yet it took endurance.
We were one flesh. So your guilt punished me
and we both shared the pain of treachery.
Houdini’s Last Trick
Driven to stunt after stunt:
handcuffed in water,
buried underground
you would emerge triumphant.
Cops double-locked their cells
but you broke out. Rivals
without your ingenuity
never collected that ten
thousand dollars you laid down.
You shook off any claim
to supernatural powers –
artifice was the game,
trained lungs, hard muscles,
and an athlete’s discipline
underpinned your puzzles.
Heroic: a dead Rabbi’s son
who poured gold coins
into a mother’s apron.
Invited in to Royal palaces.
With Conan Doyle – whose wife
wrote spirit messages –
you went to visit stylish mediums,
and were dismayed
to see through all the mysteries displayed.
It became a crusade. At séances
which banned your presence
you would use disguise. Or hired spies.
Newspapers ran your stories.
One spirit guide
foretold your death – which you defied.
But did you wonder when you left
a secret code word
with your wife, was it so absurd
to imagine, once outside the town glare
of being alive,
that spirits become visible there
like stars on a clear night?
And if anyone could break out
from an after-world, surely you might?
The thousands of fans at your funeral
half-expected an escape, as if
for you death would never be final,
there had to be one last trick – almost afraid
some lintel might suddenly crack
and a terrible window break open –
until that Wand of Rosewood was broken
by the President of Magicians,
with due ceremony, over the coffin.
Cygnet
For a child bullied at her new school
Once I watched two swans glide over the Cam,
silently powered by invisible feet,
their necks poised in a delicate curve as they swam:
cool, white creatures in Summer heat.
At the waterside some ducks at noisy play
were tipping upside down,
and fussing, as the royal birds went on their way.
In Ireland, I saw a group of swans rising
from a millpond, with tough
muscled necks stretched out in a line,
one wing-flap was enough
to take them upward with alarming power
over a cluster of ducklings
scrabbling sociably in the mud together.
When I was told, my pretty girl, of cyber
bullies on your mobile phone,
I remembered Hans Andersen’s tale of ducklings
harassing a cygnet on its own.
May his old fairy tale be set in bronze!
Children mock the face of any stranger –
but some newcomers grow up into swans.
The Old Country
In Ukraine a woman who could be my ancestor
boils forest roots. Old at forty-two,
she is shrivelled by winter. Her husband
went to fight invaders
and there is no news of him.
Diphtheria and typhus ravage
what is left of the village.
In Western comfort I pity her harsh life.
Yet angels walk beside her,
and her husband – no longer angry
and redeemed from vodka –
is waiting for her on the far shore
of that world we no longer believe in.
The News Channel
Shall we listen to the news?
In the little streets which smell of chocolate
round the Golden Square in Brussels
there are armed police
What news. There is no news.
Once I inherited fear in the stories of
borders and slippery mud on river banks,
bribes and guards and angry dogs.
Now we watch on household screens
as fences of razor wire cross
quiet European fields.
When my grandfather spoke of Odessa
he remembered the music in street cafés,
acacia trees, and summertime on Deribasovskaya.
In tents across Europe now they remember Syria:
the ancient stones, the grand restaurants.
My grandfather did not want to serve
in the hated Tsar’s army – these men too
are sick of a long war and carry children
but we are afraid of them
because they are numerous.
What news. There is no news.
Old Days
In the smell of woodsmoke and dry leaves I remember:
a glorious Cambridge of copains,
film-lit by Truffaut, Aznavour, Brassens,
lifelong friendships long since over,
when I fell in love unsuitably with
clever schoolboys or narrow-hipped dancers,
