Coastline by Elaine Feinstein
Poetry Nation 6, 1976
Coastline
This is the landscape of the Cambrian age:
shale, blue quartz, planes of slate streaked with
iron and lead; soapstone, spars of calcite;
in these pools, fish are the colour of sand,
velvet crabs like weeds, prawns transparent as water.
This shore was here before man. Every tide
the sea returns, and floats the bladderwrack.
The flower animals swell and close over creatures
rolled-in, nerveless, sea-food, fixed and forgotten.
My two thin boys balance on Elvan stone
bent-backed, intent, crouched with their string and pins,
their wet feet white, lips salt, and skin wind-brown,
watching with curiosity and compassion:
further out, Time and Chance are waiting to happen.
Elaine Feinstein was a poet, novelist, and biographer. She received many prizes, including a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, Society of Authors', Wingate and Arts Council Awards, and an Honorary D.Litt from the University of Leicester. She travelled across the world to read her poems, and her books have been translated into most European languages; also Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Her versions of the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, a New York Times Book of the Year, have remained in print since 1971. She was given a major grant from the Arts Council to write her novel, The Russian Jerusalem, a phantasmagoric mix of prose and poetry (Carcanet, 2008). Her collection Cities came out in 2010, Portraits in 2015 and her new and selected poems, The Clinic, Memory, in 2017. She served on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, of which she was a Fellow, as a judge for many literary awards, and as a Chair of the Judges for the T.S.Eliot Award. She received a Civil List Pension in 2010. She died in September 2019.
Subscribe to PN Review magazine at pnreview.co.uk.