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Sat 05 May 2007On the complexities of a long marriagePoetryIn an interview with the editor of PN Review, Elaine Feinstein commented on Al Alvarez's The Savage God: "I remember his introduction well. Not for me. If you've escaped the Holocaust entirely by the serendipitous chance of your family deciding not to settle in Germany, and you're conscious of that - as I was from about age nine onwards - you don't look for suicidal risks much.That's not exciting. Death is not exciting." Feinstein is not a writer to indulge in shrill Plathianism, even when her subjects encompass both bereavement and her Jewishness, as they do in her most recent collection, Talking to the Dead. The addressee of most of these poems is her late husband, Arnold Feinstein, and their tone is intimate and by turns vexed, tender, bereft. As the cover note states quite candidly, "theirs was not an easy relationship", and the poems are lucidly unsentimental in their delineation of the complexities of a long marriage. Variation on an Akhmatova Poem sums it up in nine succint lines: