| Ruth Fainlight (b. New York, 1931) is an award-winning poet and translator, whose collections, starting with Cages in 1966, have spanned five decades. Her 1976 collection Another Full Moon was described by Peter Porter as having "the steadiness and clarity of the moon itself", and A S Byatt has said of her poems that they "give us truly new visions of usual and mysterious events". Fainlight has lived in England since the age of 15, achieving success in fiction, translation and opera libretti as well as poetry. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008.
On the process of writing a poem, Fainlight has said: "Like every other living organism, its development is a unique combination of unassailable laws and the entirely unexpected". One hallmark of her work is the special attention she pays to the apparently ordinary stuff of life, finding strangeness and even mysticism beneath familiar surfaces. Domestic life often contains and reveals the most significant truths. Handbag, for instance, with its intimate textures and smells, conjures an entire world, moving in just twelve lines from the smallness of the everyday objects carried around by the mother to a formidable list of human experiences : "womanliness, / and love, and anguish, and war".
Fainlight often uses keen physical memories as a way of creating surprise and coherence. In her poem Blankets, for example, the "old blue blankets" are so loaded with recollections of childhood nightmares and illness, they are not so much comforting as "potent and dangerous". Ageing and loss are more directly confronted in Friends' Photos, which mourns the "lost glamour" of youth. While many of the poems are intensely autobiographical, others take their inspiration from elsewhere: the real and imagined lives of others (such as the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova), and religious and mythical figures, including the Sibyls. Elegant Sibyl is one of dozens of poems Fainlight has written about these ambiguous females with their prophetic gifts.
Ruth Fainlight and Sylvia Plath were friends in the years shortly before Plath's death, and it is possible to make connections, both thematic and stylistic, between the two. Their reading styles, however, are quite different. Fainlight's voice is full of warmth and quiet intensity; her skilful pacing and punctuation makes this a beautifully clear and rewarding experience for the listener.
From Sibyls and Others (1980)
1 A Sibyl 1.41
2 Blocked Sibyl 1.18
3 Driving Northward 0.51
4 Trees 0.56
5 It Must 3.25
6 Animal Tamer 2.00
From Fifteen to Infinity (1983)
7 Passenger 1.59
8 Handbag 0.57
9 In Memoriam H.P.F. 1.09
10 As Though She Were a Sister 1.01
11 Death's Love-Bite 1.44
From The Knot (1990)
12 The Knot 1.56
13 On The Theme of Artifice 1.50
14 Poppies 1.23
15 Ovid among the Scythians 1.29
16 That Presence 1.14
From This Time of Year (1993)
17 A Mourner 1.10
18 Homage 1.07
19 Lineage 1.32
20 Late Low Sun 2.09
21 Thunder 2.15
22 Facts About the Sibyl 1.12
23 Elegant Sibyl 1.57
From Sugar-Paper Blue (1997)
24 Friends' Photos 1.26
25 Young Men 1.12
26 Whatever 1.29
27 Autumn Crocus 0.41
From Burning Wire (2002)
28 What 1.38
29 Ordinary Sorrow 1.15
30 Potatoes 1.34
31 Feathers 2.05
32 Four Pheasants 1.12
33 La Taviata in 2001 5.37
34 Sheba & Solomon: I - Their Words 2.03
35 Sheba & Solomon: XI - Water 1.14
36 Sheba & Solomon: XII - Solomon's Desire 2.27
From Moon Wheels (2006)
37 Moon Wheels 1.28
38 Blankets 2.26
39 Lovely Hands 1.15
40 Crocuses 0.38
Uncollected
41 Midland Contemporary 2.10
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