And overflowing their rims,
into the black earth, to nourish
the rushes unstoppably
without cure, gushes
verse

This was a necessary refuge, a raft where the sea's bed is murky. There is so much doubt, singed with hunger on these pages, yet there's a human exuberance. There's agency, not tr potlatch, no Cleopatra dissolving a priceless pearl in and drinking the dregs, as Calasso noted. There are quests and memorials. There is rapt ardor even when the soul's been steeped in grief. There's a determination to right the course when fate has proved abusive.

The last concept, of sense-making within the delirium of an overturned world is evidenced in the sublime An Attempt At Room, a poem which appears to me to be the analogy of making a home in a collapsing building.

For a rendezvous is a locality,
A list - calculation, sketch -
Of words that are not always apposite,
Of gestures all wrong, simply out of touch.

Reading her lines, one can inhale the ancient perseverance, the ability to manage the ignoble and the banal with no chance for posterity. There's a line in a novel I broached recently, an exile is a refugee with a library. ( )

I first fell in love with her "Poems for Akhmatova":
"Muse of lament, you are the most beautiful of
all muses, a crazy emanation of white night:
and you have sent a black snow storm over all Russia.
We are pierced with the arrows of your cries

so that we shy like horses at the muffled
many times uttered pledge--Ah!--Anna
Akhmatova--the name is a vast sight
and it falls into depths without name

and we wear crowns only through stamping
the same earth as you, with the same sky over us....

I stand head in my hands thinking how
unimportant are the traps we set for one another..."

This collection also contains her beautiful elegies for Moscow, her tender listing of beloved details, her heartfelt sarcasm. ( )

Weariness and beauty permeate the poetry of Maria Tsvetaeva. She struggled with life and love over the course of her short existence, but endured, supported in part by fellow artists, most notably Mandelstam, Rilke and Pasternak. The poetry in this selection is arrayed in chronological order and ranges from the "starry nights, in the apple orchards of Paradise"(p 5) to the "muffled blow" of Epitaph (p 106).

Inspiration from fellow poets Mayakovsky, Blok and Akhmatova impress upon the reader her poetic muse and mystery. I like the poetry infused with literary references, Shakespeare and others, as this is a type that I share with her - in my own humble way. She has a way of making the simplest image seem to embody meaning beyond the possibilities of a finite world. She suggests this and more in lines like:

"a manifestly yellow, decidedly
rusty leaf--has been left behind on the tree." (p 120)

Her poetry exhibits an aesthetic beauty that transcends my ability to describe the feelings it embodies. Along with Pasternak, Mandelstam, and Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva stands as one of the four great Russian poets of the Twentieth Century and is one of the most important Women writers in the Western Canon. ( )