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Pack a
Poet in Your Suitcase
Cities, Elaine Feinstein
(60pp, £9.95, Carcanet)
The Scent of Your Shadow, Kristiina Ehin (110pp, £9.99, Arc)
Away from the City, Lee Smith (40pp, £6.50, Salt)
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Feinstein
is a poet whose work has always been resonant for me, and in this fairly slim
collection, she travels around Europe and even further afield bringing cities
and their histories into the light of her work. The book opens with a short
sequence reflecting on migration, of birds and of people. Feinstein makes it
clear she is a citizen of the globe in the closing lines:
I remember
How easily
the civil world turns brutal.
If it does,
we shall have the same enemies.
Her own Jewish ancestry gives this thought more poignancy but it also sets
the cities she writes of into context: these are places which have suffered
destruction and pain, and could easily do so again. The first place she takes
us to is wartime Leicester, an intelligent transition from the opener. She
examines her past self in the third person, distancing, as she moves from
Leicester to Cambridge, discovering poetry and sex with a delightful sense of
humour: good poems that are accessible.
A further sequence is a love poem to Jerusalem, tracing it through
different times, wanting to protect it. In 'Warsaw 1973', she recalls the
sack of the Warsaw ghetto, tells of her cousin who survived by being hidden
by clients from her mother's hairdresser's shop. The palimpsest is effective,
and simply done. In the Budapest sequence, she introduces us to people
haunted by the war, such as Janos Pilinszky, a poet, who, in a marvellous
phrase, 'lives in the guilt of witness'. The ghosts are never absent;
Budapest is a city of 'human sprawl/ someone might hope to hide in, even from
Eichmann'.
All Feinstein's cities are populated with writers she admires: Mandelstam,
Kafka, Havel, Tsvataeva, Grotsz, as though they are still alive, their words
resonate throughout the streets. Similarly, musicians echo through her mind.
'A Dream of Prague' is dedicated to the memory of Miroslav Holub, the
wonderful Czechoslovakian poet I was once lucky enough to meet. It is a
beautiful elegy and Prague 'city of dreams' is the perfect setting, as she
delights in her memories of 'an Art Deco cafe, /green marble and mosaic
restored '. The poem ends on a soothing image:
Three weeks later,
A Czech friend rang to tell us you were dead,
your witty spirit
sailing off
into the starry darkness
over the
Belvedere.
This is not an unhappy collection, there's plenty of food and fun here too,
and mesmeric scents. But it is
meditative and nostalgic, filled with a quiet sorrow, yet at the same time
'stubbornly content'. There's nothing obscure or difficult here; the reader
is invited in and gently cherished.
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Feinstein's
grandparents left Odessa long ago, but the next collection is from an
Estonian poet, Kristiina Ehin, translated by Ilmar Lehtpere, who is a poet in
his own right. We have the benefit of the Estonian on the leftÐhand side and
the English on the right. I love this, even though I know no Estonian,
because the shape of the original can be enjoyed while reading the
translation. The book is introduced by Sujata Bhatt. Few of the poems have
titles, but the book is divided into sections which do help the reader
navigate. Some of the poems are long but hold the reader's attention easily.
Ehin's imagery is organic and often very beautiful. For example in the third section, she describes autumn
like this:
A whole pile of gold
has settled
under the maple at the end of the street
The maple itself has been left bare
left empty
and open as the sky
All the
clouds have fled in fear from the wind
sweeping over
the open fields
Ehin's poems are deeply personal, but not in a way that excludes the reader:
quite the opposite, they draw the reader in, so that Ehin's life feels like
our own, a fascinating glimpse into a different, simpler life lived close to
nature. Reading these poems is like a holiday of the best kind: eye-opening,
relaxing and different. Ehin's work is rooted in Estonian folk tradition, and
music permeates both the forms and the language. I particularly relished her
poems about parenthood, for their beauty and tenderness.
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And it
is back to the city again in a chapbook by a new voice, Lee Smith, the first
in a new series from Salt, Modern Voices, elegant chapbooks all with stunning
modern artwork for their covers. The first section is all about Melbourne in
the autumn and winter, the second the same season in Cambridge. These are
short accessible poems accompanied by black and white photographs. The poet's
eyes watch people and give us terse notes on their lives, taking us right
inside the city through its inhabitants. But there are layers on meanings in
the carefully chosen words. For example, a boy does not want to go with his
father on a custodial visit, but has no choice. The last line 'The Sunday
afternoon game begins' is a subtle metaphor for the boy's manipulation of his
parents, but could literally be the game they are going to watch. The real
joy of this short collection is the clever links Smith makes between the two
cities he is writing about, and the clever links between poems within each
half of the book. For instance, in the Cambridge section, the opening
sequence ends with:
An ambulance
in silence
lights its
way to the hospital.
The next poem begins with the word 'lights', and the following poem,
'Addenbrooke's Hospital' describes a scene on a bus, in terse, compassionate
lines:
A woman
tear-faced
hands a
tenner
to the bus
driver
pushes the
baby past
and tells her
young daughter
to find a
seat.
The cold fingers
of daddy's
hand
still falling
from her
grasp.
The resonance of the word 'grasp' makes this a strong ending.
The sequences are full of small subtle links, like graphic matches
transformed to words.
These are three wonderful collections and they are recommended, particularly
for travelling, whether on a plane, train or in your armchair.
© Angela Topping 2010
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