Thinking of Skins by Carol Rumens
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).
Carol Rumens is one of the few women poets writing today whose seriousness is absolute but not closed; whose political beliefs are so enmeshed with her intelligence and sympathetic passions that it is impossible to consider the state of contemporary poetry in Britain without taking her work into account..She retains her feminine voice, but extends her sympathies beyond feminism in sinewy but heart-piercing poems. -- Anne Stevenson
So much of the pathos and courage of her poetry comes from the way she confronts experience with balance and control...abandoning safety, and finding an utterance which makes her one of the finest younger poets writing in England today * Elaine Feinstein *
Here is real poetic authority, singular, sure, strong. The subject matter does not differ much from that of most contemporary poets, save that Rumens brings political consciousness into almost every line...certainty in her every phrase. This book collects from her eight previous books as well as presents recent work written since she moved to Belfast. An exciting, inspiring poet. * Booklist *
So much of the pathos and courage of her poetry comes from the way she confronts experience with balance and control...abandoning safety, and finding an utterance which makes her one of the finest younger poets writing in England today * Elaine Feinstein *
Here is real poetic authority, singular, sure, strong. The subject matter does not differ much from that of most contemporary poets, save that Rumens brings political consciousness into almost every line...certainty in her every phrase. This book collects from her eight previous books as well as presents recent work written since she moved to Belfast. An exciting, inspiring poet. * Booklist *
Carol Rumens is the author of 17 collections of poems, as well as occasional fiction, drama and translation. She has received the Cholmondeley Award and the Prudence Farmer Prize, and was joint recipient of an Alice Hunt Bartlett Award. She is currently Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at Bangor University, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and edits a weekly poem column for the Guardian, from which she has published the anthology Smart Devices: 52 Poems from The Guardian 'Poem of the Week' (Carcanet Press, 2019). Her recent books include Self into Song: Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures (2007), and the collections Blind Spots (2008), De Chirico's Threads (2010) and Animal People (2016) from Seren. She has translated Russian poetry with her late partner Yuri Drobyshev, including the work of Irina Ratushinskaya in Pencil Letter (Bloodaxe Books, 1988) and Evgeny Rein in his Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2001).
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781852242800 |
| ISBN 10 | 1852242809 |
| Title | Thinking of Skins |
| Author | Carol Rumens |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Bloodaxe Books Ltd |
| Year published | 1993-09-23 |
| Number of pages | 160 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |