A collection of poems by Elisavietta Ritchie, inspired by birds and certain humans, paired with collages of photographs of feathers and the watercolors of artist Megan Richard.
PREFACE This will be the third collection of Elisavietta Ritchie's work we have been privileged to publish, and what a remarkable collection it is. Rich imagination and a talent for metaphor are the hallmarks of her work. Here we see a poet writing at the top of her game, and game is the precise word for the often whimsical accounts she gives of the paintings she meditates on.One thinks of Keats' critical touchstone, the concept of negative capability he proposes, the sensitivity and imaginative power an artist has to intuit even the very center of cue ball, the ability of the individual to perceive, think, and operate outside the box. Poets often employ this symbiotic relationship with the visual arts, a literary device known as ekphrasis used to convey the deeper symbolism of the corporeal art form by means of a separate medium such as poetry. The poet contemplates a work of art and responds with a lifetime of experience and curiosity to imagine the world found in a given painting. Here are poems written in the voices of the artist, his wife (who might also be an artist), his mistress, his models, his viewers, his dog--One thinks of the recent popular film in which all the characters in the paintings found in a museum step out of their frames and celebrate their liberation once the museum doors have closed for the night. It seems a happy collaboration of poet and artist enhancing our understanding of a painting, as well as taking joy in the work from a verbal perspective. "How do I know what I think until I see what I say," I believe WH Auden once quipped.I think of a William Meredith poem from HAZARD THE PAINTER which tells the story of a 8-year-old Erica, a "factory of will," who when she returns from dancing class, "she dances!" Long may the dance continue for Lisa Ritchie and all her devoted followers who love how poetry can buoy the human spirit in the hands of such a fierce intelligence and curiosity. Richard Harteis
TIGER UPSTAIRS ON CONNECTICUT AVENUE is the perfect title for Elisavietta Ritchie's new collection: roaring, juxtaposing the outrageous and the mundane, and leaving nothing from her omnivorous imagination. ..".reading some of her poems is akin to watching a wick sizzle down on a firecracker, waiting for the pop, the smoke, and the final hiss...Whether looking through the scrim into death, or looking back through history at her own family, I imagine Ritchie to be some mad cheerleader for passion, stealing blackberries, loving a dying friend, or recuperating from a bad mushroom trip, all the while refusing to give up, to be satiated... . Life and death. Passion and its opposite, her touchstones...that give her voice power; after all 'like fire, when we no longer burn, we die.'"--Scott Whitaker
Elisavietta Ritchie is a woman who has really lived and this verbal rumination on her heritage, the people she has loved, the family recipes for borscht or cherry vodka or bread are filled with such exquisite, well-realized detail, a reader is drawn along with the force of a rip tide on a summer afternoon at the beach. It's all simply so interesting. And her conversations with the past and recently dead intrigue us: "It tolls for thee," they remind us, and yes, we all do eventually get out alive according to this wise woman when it comes our time to ponder the great mystery of death. Russia's nostalgia for its glorious past - its literature, art, dance, theatre could not be extinguished in a century of Communist revisionism. This nostalgia seems worked into the very DNA of the Russian soul right down to the present day as the country seeks to take the world stage once again. At the root of this nostalgia is the ghost of a genteel aristocracy which ended in the forest assassination of the Czar's family and the Russian diaspora after the world wars that followed. As one of the world's great cultures, it continues to shape history and art and in this beautiful example, poetry. What we have to learn from the poems of Lisa Ritchie is everything worth preserving and protecting in life: Love, lovers, children, cousins, parents, home, shared meals, the memory of those who shaped us, the courage that won freedom, pride in self and country, an abiding attachment to the beloved dead reaching to us from the other side of life. Here are poems that extol life, sing of its joy, despite the cruelty and entropy that threaten at every turn. Lisa Ritchie is a person you would want to know, whose poetry you have here, life seen through her bright, intelligent, compassionate eyes, what poetry does at its best, give heart. An old proverb has it that "it is in the shelter of each other that we live." These poems give respite in a world too often in need of such shelter.
Poet's Choice Publishing is proud once again to bring you the poetic musings of Elisavietta Ritchie. HARBINGERS follows the peripatetic mind of a woman writing at the height of her power, making concrete all the stuff of a life lived fully and worth living: lovers, family, professional achievements; the joy of being part of it all, despite the challenges of aging, and the inevitable conclusion of winter. Here is a poet caught between "heaven and hell," who nevertheless takes it all on with great pluck and vigor, who leads the way with courage, dignity, and self assurance, a harbinger of what it means to be a talented human being in a troubling, but luminous world, a model of someone who doesn't give up on any front, burgeoning yet again.
When one reads the exquisite short title poem of GUY WIRES, the temptation, of course is to assign Elisavietta Ritchie the moniker of Spider Woman. And how wonderful and potent that the stuff of which she spins her web is love. This is a very serious poet, who weaves her poems with the tensile strength of spider silk, greater than the same weight of steel, and with much greater elasticity. Her poems make remarkable connections between her manic intelligence and the dear particulars of the world. Line by line, she pulls us forward into her creation, and we lie there, calm, mesmerized and grateful for the new take on the world she invariably wraps us in. There is a lot of talk these days of the "wise woman," something like Erda in Wagner's Ring Cycle, that makes a reader realize they are in the presence of a mind worth hearing. "Your dog knows./She's different when/the moon is full," she tells us. But the poems swing through the human passions of sex, politics, and other worldly appetites with the agility of a Peter Parker on a joyful romp through the canyons of Manhattan. She has thrown a pentagram web over her private world, organizing a lifetime of experience and joy into five architectural sections - one thinks of Frost's notion that the final poem in a book of poetry is the book's organization. AT THE EDGE salutes dissident poets she has known and supported in a long life of taking responsibility for her actions: "Yet, in this land/ a poem can... land you in jail," and, "I have told others 'write with your blood.'" In Sisterhood: Mothers of Prisoners, she commiserates with the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, "May we at least find/ uncertain solace in our sisterhood." This is a beautifully felt group of poems, told with beautiful simplicity and power: How can shapes and blots of lives steaming with pain and so much love be forgot. The poems in WEAVERS become an ars poetica for the poet, and often reflect on the great mystery of death. In time I'll go blind so while the lunatic moon crowns from the sea must write fast snatch at stars - In part three, EXPLORATIONS, Ritchie alerts us to the fact that she is coloring outside the lines. The Thing about Drinking, for example treats us to multiple personalities "in a single bound," as it were. Some of these poems are simply a riot. After a long plodding trek to find a beach and finally have a swim, she is greeted with a signboard reading: BEWARE! RIPTIDES! RISKY! BOXJELLYFISH LETHAL! SHARKS! CROCODILES! The last two sections of GUY WIRES imagine other lives in the animal kingdom: FELLOWS; and, celebrate the moving force, love, pushing all of creation forward in the final section of the web titled CENTRAL. We leave them to you, no comment, to peruse at your pleasure, but only to say how proud and pleased we are to have been bitten by this exotic, startling, and powerful creature. What a poet!
Elisavietta Ritchie's poetry could be in the tradition of Moore, Bishop or Akhmatova, both the lyrical and the grim: an insatiable curiosity about the world pervades her poems, rendered in deceptively understated, clear lines. Yet as the world teems with life and knowledge, the poems of Awaiting Permission to Land churn far more deeply than their lines reveal at first glance. --Cherry Grove Collections.
Elisavietta Ritchie's poetry could be in the tradition of Moore, Bishop or Akhmatova, both the lyrical and the grim: an insatiable curiosity about the world pervades her poems, rendered in deceptively understated, clear lines. Yet as the world teems with life and knowledge, the poems of Awaiting Permission to Land churn far more deeply than their lines reveal at first glance. --Cherry Grove Collections.
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