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.