Born and raised in New York City in a milieu infused with Russian culture, Natalie Bider Lardner has been writing poems for five decades. This is Eden is her first published book. It is a poetry collection that encompasses eight stages of a love cycle: Courtship, Places, People, States of Mind, Divorce, Resilience, Love and Sex, and Death.

Lardner's poems involve an acute observation of life facts and situations, and her style goes from lyricism to the technical challenges of poetic forms, which she achieves successfully.

As a teacher of English and as a professional translator from Russian, her lines are carefully crafted and every single word has a necessary place in each poem, there are no extra divagations.

Instead of a formal introduction to her book, she placed a first poem that reflects very well the content of the following pages. The title of the poem is "Destination Wedding":

Destination Wedding

Shall we enjoy a feast during the plague

or after or before, considering that

the blackest plagues recur, their pustules, ague

and pyres burn, peaking and falling flat?

Shall we go dance in fields where soldiers died

in wars that only led to other wars

the ink of treaties barely dry, tears cried

and wiped as greed and need reopened sores?

Shall we rebuild old governments and towns

bulldoze the crumbling remnants of what fell

rededicate ourselves while background sounds

suggest calliope and carousel?

And shall we have a wedding on the scene

of so much torment, bondage, death, and rape

when years of history have intervened

brought self-reflection, talk and shifting shape?

Regardless, lovers stand where others stood

and plight their troth with fingers ringed for good.

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