EF is the author of over 15 poetry collections, and in Britain her poetic connections are wide, but her horizons also extend far beyond the UK: influenced in her early work by modernist poets like Ezra Pound, in the 1950s she was excited by American experimental and avant-garde literary movements - by their lack of punctuation and line ending which suggested thinking out loud. Her first book of poems, In A Green Eye (1966), developed some of these writing methods, directly transcribing her lyrical speech rhythms.
Her family and domestic life, her writer friends in Britain or abroad, strangers; all are described in her work with sympathy, if also with a wry eye. EF's poems give intimate insight into the fears and consolations of family life, particularly her elegies to her parents and her poems about her long marriage. Her own Jewish cultural heritage, and the wider Jewish European experience in the twentieth century, also inform her writing. Darkness is ever-present in EF's work, be it personal loss or the long shadow of the Holocaust. In poems such as 'Hotel Maimonides' she discusses her dreams, fears and conflicting emotions about Israel and the Palestinians. In 'Annus Mirabilis 1989' she explores anti-Semitism, as she imagines watching a dissident cabaret in Budapest with herself, a Jewish tailor, in the audience.
Her Collected Poems and Translations (2002) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. In 1990, she received a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, and was given an Honorary D.Litt from the University of Leicester. EF has served on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature and as a judge for the Gregory Awards, the Independent Foreign Fiction Award, the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Costa Poetry Prize and in 1995 was chair of the judges for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
EF is an acclaimed and award winning translator of Russian poetry, especially the works of writers Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova, with whom she has a special affinity. Tsvetaeva and other Russians feature prominently in EF's Collected Poems and Translations (2003), notably in the 'Poems for [Alexander] Blok'. In the preface to her memoir, EF explains that translation helped her to find her own poetic voice.
Her versions of the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, first published in 1971, were a New York Times Book of the Year and augmented in Bride of Ice (Carcanet, 2010)
EF's later poetry collections are reflective in theme, evoking presence and absence, exploring memory and the passage of time. Daylight (1997), Gold (2000), and Talking to the Dead (2007), dedicated to the memory of her husband, Arnold Feinstein (1926-2002), which opens with a poem at his burial; and Cities (2010). Daylight features elegies for writer friends who are dead and Gold opens with a narrative in the voice of Mozart's opera librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte (1749-1838) as he muses over the course his life has taken.
The material in this series includes pre-publication papers like manuscript and typescript drafts of her poetry, proofs, and some correspondence; in one case (The Feast of Eurydice) there is a copy of the final publication. Most of EF's major collections are represented here, from her first, In a Green Eye (1966) to Portraits (2015). There are also drafts of uncollected and early poems.