{"title":"Carol Rumens","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the poignant and evocative poetry and novels of Carol Rumens. Explore themes of identity, place, and memory in her beautifully crafted verses and narratives. Discover her works today!\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"self-into-song-book-carol-rumens-9781852247607","title":"Self into Song","description":"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\".","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49531133264145,"sku":"GOR009400320","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1852247606.jpg?v=1765448559"},{"product_id":"smart-devices-book-carol-rumens-9781784107796","title":"Smart Devices","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49550156562705,"sku":"GOR010237362","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49736687255825,"sku":"NGR9781784107796","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52335505637649,"sku":"NLS9781784107796","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53026885730577,"sku":"GOR014704292","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1784107794.jpg?v=1756707545"},{"product_id":"making-for-the-open-book-carol-rumens-9780701128487","title":"Making for the Open","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49565926686993,"sku":"GOR007739885","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52707003400465,"sku":"GOR006017016","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0701128488.jpg?v=1751105803"},{"product_id":"thinking-of-skins-book-carol-rumens-9781852242800","title":"Thinking of Skins","description":"Carol Rumens confronts the personal with the political in poems which are remarkable for their imaginative daring and their engagement with other lives. Often set against the background of Eastern Europe, Russia or her present home in Northern Ireland, they are filled with a powerful sense of loss and exile. She draws on a wide variety of characters and voices to dramatise the realities of suffering and persecution, or to write direct, honest accounts of love, separation, death and displacement. Thinking of Skins includes poems from several books Carol Rumens has published during the past 20 years, as well as a large selection of new work. It draws on collections now regarded as landmarks in modern poetry, such as Unplayed Music (1981), Star Whisper (1983), Direct Dialling (1985) and From Berlin to Heaven (1989).","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49575902085393,"sku":"GOR003759751","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51611977515281,"sku":"GOR006227062","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1852242809.jpg?v=1751457373"},{"product_id":"greening-of-the-snow-beach-book-carol-rumens-9781852240622","title":"The Greening of the Snow Beach","description":"When Carol Rumens visited Russia last year [1987], she kept a diary of her trip. As well as her day-to-day impressions of a Russia thawing out under glasnost, it includes several groups of poems: Outsiders, Revolutionary Miniatures (a sequence on the lesser lights of 1905 and 1917), Ice and Fire, and her translations of several Russian poets, from Blok to Mandelstam.    Her diary has now become a Russian scrapbook. Poems started on the trip have been finished. She has added her own photographs, and artist Jamie Jamieson-Black has contributed a series of sketches. The book offers an unusual insight into Carol Rumens's personal engagement with Russian culture, and a view of Russian lives, loves and literature.    Poetry Book Society Recommendation","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49600184090897,"sku":"GOR013350335","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1852240628.jpg?v=1751457589"},{"product_id":"strange-girl-in-bright-colours-book-carol-rumens-9780704330269","title":"Strange Girl in Bright Colours","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49609316434193,"sku":"GOR013413819","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49657652543761,"sku":"GOR009826368","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0704330261.jpg?v=1751295388"},{"product_id":"blind-spots-book-carol-rumens-9781854114655","title":"Blind Spots","description":"Informed by a consciousness that is as fiercely personal and tender as it is public-minded and political, this compelling collection presents a wide range of poetry, from a sonnet, a sestina, and a villanelle, to a pantoum, a ghazal, or a fluid free verse poem. Divided into two parts, the book's first part contains a series of muse poems that are inspired by lines or images from the Italian poet, Eugenio Montale, and also influenced by the Hull-based poet, Philip Larkin. The central themes of these poems--longing, inspiration, unrequited desire, aging, change--are beautifully surmised in this important sequence. The second section varies between quick family portraits, pointed observations and musings on landscapes and seasons, several sharp political pieces, and poems that seek to unsettle prejudices and thwart conventional expectations.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49612460163345,"sku":"GOR004271492","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50679969448209,"sku":"GOR003359527","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1854114654.jpg?v=1751154656"},{"product_id":"from-berlin-to-heaven-book-carol-rumens-9780701135249","title":"From Berlin to Heaven","description":"Written by the same author as \"Direct Dialling\" this collection of poems is a memorably emotional account of the relationship between public and private worlds. All the poems testify to a subtle connection between the political and personal and reflect her obsession with East\/West relations. Carol Rumens has published four collections of poetry andm is currently writer-in-residence at Edinburgh University. She has a large feminist audience and edited \"Making for the Open - The Chatto Book of Post-Feminist Poetry\".","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49628536307985,"sku":"GOR005422073","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0701135247.jpg?v=1751394068"},{"product_id":"plato-park-book-carol-rumens-9780006542766","title":"Plato Park","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49648801743121,"sku":"GOR005685962","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/000654276X.jpg?v=1751004280"},{"product_id":"animal-people-book-carol-rumens-9781781723180","title":"Animal People","description":"A new collection by the poet Carol Rumens is an eagerly-awaited event. Animal People is inspired by what the author describes as ‘the seasons of a sometimes Welsh and sometimes English year’. A lecturer at Bangor University, Rumens can dazzle with her descriptions of the Welsh countryside while also poking gentle fun at her status as ‘incomer’.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49652410417425,"sku":"GOR008286163","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1781723184.jpg?v=1751440223"},{"product_id":"mixed-urn-book-carol-rumens-9781937679873","title":"The Mixed Urn","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA Different Vision\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd when the bright detail was restored, \u003cbr\u003eall my senses danced, until Ravel's \u003cbr\u003eKaddish, rinsed with too much sunshine, scalded\u003cbr\u003ethe morning with a blinding rain. I saw you \u003cbr\u003eand I thought if only I'd been more aware \u003cbr\u003eof all my retinal glitches, darnings, rainbows, \u003cbr\u003eI could have seen more clearly how to love you. \u003cbr\u003eWhat shall I do with all this finer light?\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49666123301137,"sku":"GOR013765515","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/193767987X.jpg?v=1763483628"},{"product_id":"unplayed-music-book-carol-rumens-9780436439001","title":"Unplayed Music","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50044112208145,"sku":"GOR003259676","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/043643900X.jpg?v=1751103899"},{"product_id":"best-china-sky-book-carol-rumens-9781852243371","title":"Best China Sky","description":"Many of these poems were written in Northern Ireland in the year since the ceasefire. As well as war, reconciliation now has a place in Carol Rumens's imaginative engagement with her new adopted home. Those poems with English themes owe much to her response to Belfast's unexpected balancing act, as well as to the perspective and safety of a distanced view. There are also fables inspired by Celtic mythology, and translations of Russian poems from Cold War times which are no less relevant in our present climate of market totalitarianism and historical erasure.    Carol Rumens sets up so many opposites in Best China Sky (childhood and motherhood, suburb and vision, sun and rain, intimacy and solitude) that its muse is probably Janus, his throne no longer an armoured car but a rainbow.    Poetry Book Society Recommendation.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50530852471057,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50530852569361,"sku":"GOR008542715","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1852243376.jpg?v=1751457581"},{"product_id":"new-women-poets-book-carol-rumens-9781852241452","title":"New Women Poets","description":"None of the new women poets in this anthology has yet published a book, yet they include some of the most original new voices of the Nineties. Most have already been widely published in magazines, and some have won major literary prizes. All are now at the point of producing first collections which will help set the tone of poetry in the new decade, with poems that are passionate and precise, subtle and skilful, sardonic and streetwise, acure, aware or quietly moving.    'The whole notion that women poets can be legitimately grouped in this way, and that gender is almost a symbolic form of nationality, owes everything to the Women's Movement, and the literary revolution it created. The very fact that such a book as this can be published at all proves the success of that revolution. Any amassing of women's voices will amount to a fairly radical critique of current society. It is up to the reader to decide that that critique is.' - Carol Rumens    The poets included are: Rachel Blake, Vuywelwa Carlin, Liz Cashdan, Janet Fisher, Linda France, Cynthia Fuller, Elizabeth Garrett, Adele Geras, Angela Greene, Lavinia Greenlaw, Fiona Hall, Tracey Herd, Jackie Kay, Mimi Khalvati, Gwyneth Lewis, S.J. Litherland, Christine McNeill, Jill Maughan, Mary O'Donnell, Katrina Porteous, Anne Rouse, Eva Salzman, Linda Saunders, Christiania Whitehead, Briar Wood.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50606606352657,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50606607008017,"sku":"GOR004626245","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1852241454.jpg?v=1751457232"},{"product_id":"selected-poems-book-carol-rumens-9780701132019","title":"Selected Poems","description":"Rein is an elegiac poet. His main theme is the end of things, the end, to put it more broadly, of a world order that is dear - or at least acceptable- to him. The incarnation of this order in his poetry is the city in which he grew up, and the city of Leningrad.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50643921240337,"sku":"GOR006845177","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53480115437841,"sku":"GOR003807314","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0701132019.jpg?v=1751295189"},{"product_id":"poems-1968-2004-book-carol-rumens-9781852246808","title":"Poems 1968-2004","description":"Carol Rumens has always confronted the personal with the political in poems which are remarkable for their imaginative daring and their engagement with other lives. Often set against the background of Eastern Europe, Russia or Northern Ireland, they are filled with a powerful sense of loss and exile. She draws on a wide variety of characters and voices to dramatise the realities of suffering and persecution, or to write direct, honest accounts of love, separation, death and displacement. Publication celebrates Carol Rumens's 60th birthday on 10 December 2004","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50683378696465,"sku":"GOR006495885","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1852246804.jpg?v=1751457388"},{"product_id":"mind-s-eye-book-carol-rumens-9781916938540","title":"Mind's Eye","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMind's Eye: Notelets \u0026amp; Dialogues in Tribute to Paul Celan\u003c\/em\u003e by Carol Rumens is a profound exploration of memory, language, and trauma. In this compelling collection, Rumens engages in a dialogue with the life and work of the poet Paul Celan, whose poetry was deeply influenced by his experiences during the Holocaust and his struggle with mental illness. Through poems that range from intimate 'notelets' to imagined conversations between Celan and his unfinished work, Rumens offers a tribute that reflects on the fragility of life, the endurance of art, and the complexities of survival. This collection is an homage to one of the 20th century's most enigmatic poets, bringing new perspectives on grief, displacement, and the transformative power of words.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51056582197521,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51056585081105,"sku":"NIN9781916938540","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53055531680017,"sku":"GOR014718414","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/191693854X.jpg?v=1751250157"},{"product_id":"de-chirico-s-threads-book-carol-rumens-9781854115348","title":"De Chirico's Threads","description":"Carol Rumens's new collection, De Chirico's Threads, features 40 pages of poetry as well as an innovative verse-play.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51228830597393,"sku":"GOR004719133","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1854115340.jpg?v=1750930537"},{"product_id":"hex-book-carol-rumens-9781852246020","title":"Hex","description":"Carol Rumens has always confronted the personal with the political in poems which are remarkable for their imaginative daring and their engagement with other lives. In her latest book of poems, she also stands against death itself, accepting mortality but invoking poetry’s alchemical powers of extending life through memory.  Hex imagines a flawed God at work on a seriously failed creation. It doesn’t like the human race much either. Now and again it tries to say positive things but the overall view is God, what a mess. Surely as the shiny new millennium grinds on with blood-soaked predictability, we have to give up on any belief in the possibility of human evolution? But is there any design at all in creation? Or are we just all victims of some hex?   Hex is Carol Rumens’s most varied collection, written in many different voices, including a series of highly inventive ‘rogue translations’ of Pushkin, Akhmatova and Ovid, with Mandelstam reimagined as a South London wide boy of the 1940s. She resurrects the figure of John Constable in a group of English pastoral meditations, and gives Sylvia Plath a chance to respond in the playfully posthumous sonnets of Letters Back. This reinvented Plath is a mask, according to Lidia Vianu, ‘a very Desperado device, wonderfully used…a resourceful, half-ironic, half critical dialogue with another poetic universe.’","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51490180366609,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51490180497681,"sku":"GOR003809057","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1852246022.jpg?v=1751457348"},{"product_id":"direct-dialling-book-carol-rumens-9780701129118","title":"Direct Dialling","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52325345722641,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52325345820945,"sku":"GOR007792471","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780701129118.jpg?v=1758027726"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-carol-rumens.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}