Elaine Feinstein and Roy Fisher have each established such a hold in British poetry that a new collection from either will surely be valued. Feinstein is a prolific novelist and biographer as well as a poet. The first chapter of her life of Anna Akhmatova succinctly depicts St. Petersburg in 1913 and Feinstein quotes her own translation of Akhmatova as an epigraph: 'The whole mournful city was drifting / Towards a destination nobody guessed'. A sense of drift, made mournful with hindsight, dominates Cities, her new collection.
    Cities here are nests between flights. The first section of 'Migrations', the first poem, is a short lyric about birds, packed with reference to be explored further in the collection: 'Mandelstam's goldfinch', for example. Russian poet Osip Mandelstam saw the caged goldfinch as representing defiance to oppression and was himself eventually imprisoned by Stalin's regime. Mandelstram crops up in 'St Petersburg', and the bird's song and yellow colour liven various poems. Holding center place in the single seven-line staza of this section, the goldfinch raises the poet up to the star navigations of geese and white throat warblers:

    All
arrive using the stars, along
flyways old as Homer and Jeremiah.

Cities, then, like nests, need to be flown: 'The city is thus like nature and not unnatural' as Sidney Monas points out in an essay on Mandelstram. However the city life Feinstein reports is mostly the life of the mind. Homer, wandering homesick through cities, and Jeremiah, condemning human evil, are personas that wrestle in these quiet note-like poems. Here is the first stanza of 'Warsaw, 1973':

Wajda's city of ashes and diamonds, where
a fairground wheel once turned
to carnival music while the ghetto burned.

    Feinstein uses film directors, writers and philosophers to civilize the brutally anti-semitic cities of twentieth-century Europe. And the poet, first young, the ageing, balances larger horrors with the intimate, as in 'Loss':

I felt awkward and unhappy: there was no
quarrel, just something that I failed to understand,
your letter said. It's sad. I loved you once,
and would have called you at the Gates of Hell.
How do you revive a ailing spell?

This is both witty - with its hint at 'fainting spell' - and rhetoric of diminution that flares up regularly through the collection, giving a ghostly light to the flat - because lost - cafe encounters with celebrities. Feinstein long ago decided to ask what relationships between bright minds can ever mean, whether personal, political or professional. Perhaps her most extensive exploration of this question has been made in her prose. But cutting through the necessary sophistication of that task, like weed through city cement, comes a personal anxiety that lifts this book beyond the merely glittering. 'A Garden in North Germany' shows this:

        The whiteness
    of the garden enters me

bloodless, vampiric, as if I were visiting
    my parents as a young wife
to be pampered and safe, while the soul
    of my true rackety life
were being leech out of me.
    Everyone is so kind
I have no strength to walk
    in the burning cold outside.

Where she couches echoes of Poe in her signature urbanity, moving slowly through cities in a nightmare. Feinstein's poems are riveting.