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.
