Babushka's Beads

<p>Elisavietta Ritchie is a woman who has really lived and this verbal rumination on her heritage the</p><p>people she has loved the family recipes for borscht or cherry vodka or bread</p><p>are filled with such exquisite well-realized detail a reader is drawn along with</p><p>the force of a rip tide on a summer afternoon at the beach. It’s all simply so interesting.</p><p>And her conversations with the past and recently dead intrigue us: “It</p><p>tolls for thee” they remind us and yes we all do eventually get out alive according</p><p>to this wise woman when it comes our time to ponder the great mystery of death.</p><p>Russia’s nostalgia for its glorious past – its literature art dance theatre could</p><p>not be extinguished in a century of Communist revisionism. This nostalgia seems</p><p>worked into the very DNA of the Russian soul right down to the present day as</p><p>the country seeks to take the world stage once again. At the root of this nostalgia</p><p>is the ghost of a genteel aristocracy which ended in the forest assassination</p><p>of the Czar’s family and the Russian diaspora after the world wars that</p><p>followed. As one of the world’s great cultures it continues to shape history and</p><p>art and in this beautiful example poetry.</p><p> </p><p>What we have to learn from the poems of Lisa Ritchie is everything worth preserving</p><p>and protecting in life: Love lovers children cousins parents home shared</p><p>meals the memory of those who shaped us the courage that won freedom pride in</p><p>self and country an abiding attachment to the beloved dead reaching to us from the</p><p>other side of life. Here are poems that extol life sing of its joy despite the cruelty and</p><p>entropy that threaten at every turn. Lisa Ritchie is a person you would want to know</p><p>whose poetry you have here life seen through her bright intelligent compassionate</p><p>eyes what poetry does at its best give heart. An old proverb has it that “it is in the</p><p>shelter of each other that we live.” These poems give respite in a world too often in</p><p>need of such shelter.</p>