Authors Electric

 Fifteen years ago, on the 20 th December, Vera Rich died. Among her many other incarnations she was the founder of  Manifold , "the magazine of new poetry" which was started in 1962 and appeared regularly until 1969, when it was suspended owing to her taking a job as Soviet and East European Correspondent for the scientific weekly  Nature . It was only in 1998 that it proved possible to relaunch  Manifold . It published original poetry and had two quarterly competitions, one written in a particular form, and the other on a particular topic. Many poets loved these challenges, as being given a specific task narrows the mind wonderfully. I’m going to reproduce a few of the ones I had published here, and also some more recent poems which, although unpublished, have received honourable mentions in other magazines – also in response to a particular requirement. What I want to do is to show how an exercise can really stimulate the imagination, which is often preferable t...

  Vera Rich was one of those extraordinary people who was a total one-off. Clever, funny, infuriating, multi-lingual and fiercely in favour of an independent Ukraine, she was a part of my life for fourteen years. She was revered in Ukraine and Belarus for her poetry translations, and I travelled to Ukraine with her on two occasions. Vera never needed to embellish stories – her life had been quite exciting enough. She edited the unique Manifold Magazine, and I remember her saying, oh yes, people who’d had a week’s holiday in Prague would send me poems about their extensive knowledge of the place. I spent a week in Prague hiding from the Secret Police in a circus… And then there was the time, after Poland was once again a free country, when they saw a police car broken down by the side of the road and stopped to help. The driver kept staring at Vera, until she asked him if he knew her. He stood up very straight, clicked his heels and said, “I had the honour to interrogate you in 1...