Babushka's Beads

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.