Elaine Feinstein

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 books 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.

Muriel Sparks autobiography traces how one of the great modern writers in English emerged. Beginning with luminous evocations of a 1920s childhood in Edinburgh and memories of school, taught by the original Miss Jean Brodie, Spark recalls her formative years, up to the publication of her first novel in 1957. In order to write about life as I intended to do, I felt I had first to live, Spark says. In her account of her unhappy marriage in colonial Kenya, her return to wartime London on a troop ship, working at the Foreign Office as one of the girls of slender means, editing Poetry Review and her conversion to Catholicism, Muriel Spark outlines the life that provided material for some of the best-loved novels of the twentieth century.

Feinsteins triumph is to write so well that she makes Lenas predicament not only moving, in a perfunctory dismissive way, but also painful ... [she has] an accurate and acute feeling for language, and pauses, and silence.GuardianLenas seemingly contented family life is coming apart at the seams. Her husband Ben has been having an affair with the au pair, and as their relationship slides he retreats more and more into his work in a science lab. Sons Alan and Michael may appear happy enough, but this is far from the case - both are responding to a physical world which they alone inhabit. And Lena - desperately lost and seeking an identity of her own, both inside and outside of her family unit - increasingly finds solace at the bottom of a bottle. An exploration of just how lonely - and how magic - a marriage can be, The Circle is a poignant, poetic and incredibly assured debut novel.

Beginning in present-day St Petersburg, The Russian Jerusalem explores the landscape of twentieth century Russian literature. In this evocative autobiographical novel, distinguished poet, translator, novelist and biographer Elaine Feinstein moves among the dead poets of Stalins Russia with the poet Marina Tsvetaeva as her Virgil, mingling with the ghosts of writers such as Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky. These imaginary encounters are interspersed with new poems by Feinstein. The author, herself of Russian descent, reconstructs the lives and fates of Russian, often Jewish, writers during the long age of Soviet terror, re-establishing them at the heart of the European tradition.

Elaine Feinsteins 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 poets 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.

Opening with a death in winter, this is a tender work of mourning which is wonderfully moving but never dispiriting. Elaine Feinstein uses the remembered words of a much-loved husband - sometimes affectionate, sometimes querulous - to invoke his solid presence; it is the man rather than her grief which is the centre of the book. Many lyrics recall the closeness of their last months together; others confess the ambivalence of a long marriage. Theirs was never an easy relationship, and she is not afraid to register the differences between them. With wry humour, she questions her own life before their meeting, and looks steadily at a future without him. As she imagines that future, she confronts the myths of an afterlife, a belief in God, her debts to other poets and her dependence on friends and children. Always in complete control of rhythm and tone, these beautiful lyrics explore the most intimate thoughts with a clarity and tenacity Ted Hughes once described as unique. It is Elaine Feinsteins most passionate book of poetry.

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.

VIEJAS PELÍCULAS Cuando tenía quince años, en un cine de Torquay, Bogart y Bacall me desvelaron el súbito destello de la sexualidad: la chispa electrizante de su gran aventura valía más que toda una vida tranquila. Mis padres se quedaron perplejos. Años despues, en Leicester, llore bajo la lluvia de un cementerio y recorde su serena alegria. Ahora lo entiendo: no es sexo lo que ansiamos, sino amor.

Although Ted Hughes ended his days as England's beloved poet laureate, his life was dogged by tragedy and controversy. He never entirely recovered from the suicide of his wife Sylvia Plath in 1963, for which many have held his adultery responsible. In this insightful biography, the first written since Hughes's death, Elaine Feinstein explores an altogether more complex situation, throwing new light on his relationship with his lover Assia Wevill, who later killed herself along with their young daughter.

Ted Hughes is one of the greatest English poets of this century, yet his life was dogged by tragedy and controversy. His marriage to the American poet Sylvia Plath marked his whole life and he never entirely recovered from her suicide in 1963, though he chose to remain silent on the subject for more than 30 years. Many people, including his friend Al Alvarez, have held Hughess adultery responsible for Plaths death. Elaine Feinstein first met Hughes in 1969, and she was a good friend of his and his sister Olwyns, both of whom guarded the Plath estate. She knows many of the European and America poets who so influenced Hughes - Seamus Heaney, Thom Gunn, Miroslav Holub, and knows the world in which both he and Plath moved.

El relato de la experiencia personal de Anna Ajmatova que decidió quedarse en su país después de la guerra que asoló su país.