Elaine Feinstein has excelled as both a poet and a novelist and is also a television playwright and a translator. Expertise in more than one genre is as rare in England as it is in America; and suspicion of such generalism is frequently indicated by praise of Feinstein as a "poetic novelist," which, as an early reviewer pointed out, is a canting accolade often dumped on novelists who also write poems. Nevertheless, she did first discover herself as a poet, and her first novel was conceived, she acknowledges, as a prose poem. Her impressive progress as a novelist can be seen, she has indicated, as an emancipation of prose from a provincial sense of its limits, but one simultaneously conducted to protect it from the effects of excessive deracination and ellipsis. She is not easily grouped or categorized and is an original; but she could be said to...