Smart Devices by Carol Rumens
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.
'To judge by the insights she has into the poems of others [..] Carol Rumens is highly attuned to atmospheric variations.' - Kate Miller, TLS
Carol Rumens was born in Forest Hill, South London, in 1944. She began writing music reviews for the local press when she was sixteen. She held various literary posts, including the Northern Art Fellowship, and poetry residencies located at Queen's University Belfast, University College Cork, Stockholm University and the Harvard Centre for Hellenic Studies, Nafplio. Rumens published twenty-four poetry collections, the latest of which was Mind's Eye: Notelets & Dialogues in Tribute to Paul Celan (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Professor Emerita in Creative Writing at the University of Bangor, Gwynedd. She died in April 2026.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781784107796 |
| ISBN 10 | 1784107794 |
| Title | Smart Devices |
| Author | Carol Rumens |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Carcanet Press Ltd |
| Year published | 2019-09-26 |
| Number of pages | 256 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |