Carol Rumens - Böcker

A year of hand-picked poems and commentaries from the Guardian's 'Poem of the Week' blog. Carol Rumens has been contributing 'Poem of the Week' to the Guardian for more than a dozen years. Do the maths: that's more than 624 blogs! No wonder she has a large and devoted following. She's a poet-reader, not an academic. She is fascinated by the new, but her interest is instructed by the classic poems she has read. They make her ear demanding: when it hears that something, it perks up. She perks up.'A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.' Rumens partly agrees with Williams but she develops the conceit, seeing each poem 'as a more flexible instrument, a miniature neo-cortex, that super-connective, super-layered smartest device of the mammalian brain'.She tries to avoid poems built from kits with instruction manuals. She looks for surprises, and she surprises us.

Elizabeth Bartlett's powerfully evocative poems are remarkable for their painfully truthful insights into people's lives. Born in 1924, she worked for many years in the Health Service. For Peter Forbes, she is poetry's chronicler of today's 'damaged Britain'... 'She writes about people in extreme states, some of which she has experienced herself...'

In this innovative series of public lectures at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. Carol Rumens' three lectures cover the poetry of Philip Larkin and Derek Mahon as well as form and music in the work of a range of contemporary women poets. Forget What Did? Philip Larkin's "Poems of Lost Childhood": What made this strange, sometimes unattractive personality a powerful poet? Putting aside the politics, this lecture draws on autobiographical material as well as early poems to suggest a possible imaginative source in childhood trauma. It also traces the younger Larkin's interest in Jung, Lawrence, Auden and others, and examines the famous 'two voices' of his maturity, the demotic and the literary. "Solitude and Sociability: An Introduction to the Poetry of Derek Mahon": Bleak North Antrim coastlines and a sense of isolation contrast with the warm intellectual companionship of other writers and artists often conjured in Derek Mahon's work. This lecture takes an overview of his themes and forms, including a look at the conversation he conducts, via his many dedicatory and epistolary poems, across the time-zones. "Line, Women and Song": Have women poets brought distinctive approaches to the music and metre of contemporary poetry? Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Hacker and Ruth Padel provide some of the material examined. Can there be a politically radical verse in traditional form? Can the English language and ancient, imported forms and metres still fruitfully work together? This is the fifth book in the "Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Series".

Certain to be one of the most read and talked-about poetry collections of the year, Blind Spots is a masterclass of inventive, intelligent, original, and relevant modern poetry.A major voice in contemporary verse, Carol Rumens is admired as much for her technical brilliance as for the range, breadth and subtlety of her subject matter. You might find a sonnet, a sestina, a villanelle but you'll also chance across a pantoum or a ghazal, or a fluid free verse poem where birdsong flickers off the edges of the page. Most uncommonly, these poems are informed by a consciousness that is as fiercely personal and tender as it is public-minded and political. The result is often a thrilling tension of opposites: a romance that teeters on the brink of fulfilment, or shirts that suddenly 'speak' an elegiac chorus from a clothesline on the Gaza Strip.This particular book is divided into two parts. Part one: 'Thinking about Montale by the River Hull', is a series of 'muse' poems that are inspired by lines or images from the Italian poet, Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) and also influenced by the Hull-based poet, Philip Larkin (1922-1985). Rumens has captured and re-interpreted Montale's passionate, resonant tone and artfully transposes his sun-drenched Tuscany to the cool, grey environs of the East Yorkshire river. The central themes of these poems: longing, inspiration, unrequited desire, aging, change are beautifully surmised in this important sequence.The longer Part 2 opens with a more typically witty account of an engagement between the protagonist's hand, "painter of eyes, grasper of nettles, money-masseuse, reviser of stories", and the hungry mouth of a newborn baby. Here poems vary between quick family portraits, pointed observations and musings on landscapes and seasons, several sharp political pieces, including one short lyric where floodwater puddles seem to resemble war-torn continents, a few more inspired by Larkin, and poems that are admixtures of themes, and, using multi-layered vocabularies, seek to unsettle our prejudices and thwart conventional expectations."There is no word out of place . . . This collection will be read decades from now."The Independent"It's a treat to read a poet whose Muse dances so joyfully, alongside scholarship, through these pages." Artemis, May 09

De Chirico's Threads, the new collection of poems from Carol Rumens, features an unusual centre-piece, a verse-play, fizzing with ideas and surrealist imagery, based on the life and work of the Italian painter Georgio De Chirico, as well as forty pages of distinctive and beautifully crafted individual poems by one of the UK's best poets.An acute socio-political awareness, sometimes satirical, sometimes tender, inspires a number of pieces such as the dystopian vision of '2084', while 'The Tadpole goddess' is a clever alternative nature poem. Rumens' delight in form is displayed in the series 'Six Sonnets on Petrarchan Themes'. Also here are poems about various places in London, such as the Crystal Palace rail station and 'East Ending' which celebrates an old music hall.Sophisticated, playful, relevant and humane, a new collection by Carol Rumens is not to be missed."But suddenly Carol Rumens' Blind Spots arrives, her best work ever. Philosophical, playful, with umpteen forms expertly managed, Rumens explores her fusion of the personal and political. There is no word out of place… this collection will be read decades from now…." Bill Greenwell, The IndependentCarol Rumens is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, most recently Blind Spots (Seren, 2008), as well as fiction, translations from Russian, criticism and drama (she has had three plays produced). She has been shortlisted twice for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, in 1998 and 2002. She has also edited several anthologies, and is Professor in Creative Writing and Literature at Bangor and Hull universities. She also has a weekly poetry blog on the Guardian online website.

In Carol Rumens's Bezdelki, small things like the English meaning of her Russian title help to shore up the memory of a life. These elegies for a late partner, written in memory of Yuri Drobyshev, explore the principle that death, even for atheists, isn’t purely loss. Instead, a kind of conversation between two people can be continued through willed acts of memory, whether by rooting through incidental artefacts found in a toolbox ('defiant old metals, coupled/irrefutably and awkwardly for life') or by revisiting works of Russian literature that both members of the couple admired. In Rumens's pamphlet, translations and imitations of Osip Mandelstam share space with fragments of Egyptian mythology and 'a wardrobe of old sweat-shirts' to convey the powerful, and moving, impulse to 'live with your death unburied at my core'.