Great Regulars: [Marina Tsvetayeva's] poetry, verse plays

and collected prose still speak for the voiceless of that time, particularly the young women and mothers driven to desperate measures. "Rails", as translated by [Elaine] Feinstein, quietly captures the chaos of those "departing, deserting" a country they had once called home. In the first lines of the poem, Tsvetayeva compares the railroad tracks to a bed with "tidy sheets", a place of comfort, before switching to a metaphor in which "parallel tracks ruled out/as neatly as staves" resemble sheets of music instead.

from The Times Literary Supplement: Poem of the Week: "Rails"

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