Babushka’s Beads

Elisavietta Ritchie is a woman who has really lived and this verbal rumination on her heritage, thepeople she has loved, the family recipes for borscht or cherry vodka or breadare filled with such exquisite, well-realized detail, a reader is drawn along withthe 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: “Ittolls for thee,” they remind us, and yes, we all do eventually get out alive accordingto 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 couldnot be extinguished in a century of Communist revisionism. This nostalgia seemsworked into the very DNA of the Russian soul right down to the present day asthe country seeks to take the world stage once again. At the root of this nostalgiais the ghost of a genteel aristocracy which ended in the forest assassinationof the Czar’s family and the Russian diaspora after the world wars thatfollowed. As one of the world’s great cultures, it continues to shape history andart and in this beautiful example, poetry. What we have to learn from the poems of Lisa Ritchie is everything worth preservingand protecting in life: Love, lovers, children, cousins, parents, home, sharedmeals, the memory of those who shaped us, the courage that won freedom, pride inself and country, an abiding attachment to the beloved dead reaching to us from theother side of life. Here are poems that extol life, sing of its joy, despite the cruelty andentropy 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, compassionateeyes, what poetry does at its best, give heart. An old proverb has it that “it is in theshelter of each other that we live.” These poems give respite in a world too often inneed of such shelter.