The Clinic, Memory: New and Selected Poems

In The Clinic, Memory, Elaine Feinstein has selected poems from the last half century of her writing life. They range widely: tender, early lyrics from ‘In a Green Eye'; elegies for her father and close friends, amused reflections on ageing and longer poems such as ‘Gold', based on the life of Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, or the lot of refugees in ‘Migration'. Other poems explore the conflicts in a long marriage, teased out most poignantly in poems for her late husband in ‘Talking to the Dead'. In the twenty pages of new poems which open this book, she confronts the encroachments of old age with a wry acceptance of human diminishing as macular degeneration encourages the errors she describes in ‘Delusions of the Retina', and leads her sadly to give up her car. She continues to take an ironic delight in unlikely heroes: Houdini, for instance, who after a lifetime exposing fake mediums considers getting a message through from an afterlife he does not believe in. And for the first time, in hospital, she tries to understand a mother whose tidy life she stubbornly refused to imitate.