Ruth Fainlight (Ruth Esther Fainlight) Biography

American poet, born in New York; she attended schools in the USA and England, afterwards studying at Brighton and Birmingham Colleges of Art. Cages (1966), her first substantial collection of poetry, was followed by further volumes including The Region's Violence (1973), Fifteen to Infinity (1983), Selected Poems (1987), The Knot (1990), and This Time of Year (1993). Fainlight's essential qualities as a poet are indicated by her line ‘fineness and toughness, my own special markings’; her work combines imagery of precision and delicacy with a resilient sensibility. Much of her poetry is concerned with the social and cultural constraints imposed on women. While her writing generally uses a contemporary realist mode, she has made recurrent use of mythology, most notably in Sibyls and Others (1980). Her translations include Marine Rose (1989), poems from the Portuguese of Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. Among her other publications are the volumes of short stories Daylife and Nightlife (1971) and Dr Clock's Last Case (1994). With her husband Alan Sillitoe she wrote All Citizens Are Soldiers (1969), an adaptation of a play by Lope de Vega.