Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 92
ISBN: 9781854114655
Publication date: June 25, 2008
Price: £8.99
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.
Listen to Carol Rumens read her poem, ‘Women, Veiled’:
Carol Rumens
Carol Rumens was born in Forest Hill, South London. She won a scholarship to grammar school, and later studied Philosophy at London University, but left before completing her degree. She later gained a Postgraduate Diploma in Writing for the Stage from City College Manchester. She has taught at the University of Kent at Canterbury, Queen’s University Belfast, University College Cork, University of Stockholm, and the University of Hull; she is currently Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Bangor. She has held the position of Poetry Editor for the literary newspaper, (the publisher) Quarto, and for the Literary Review, and she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The author of fifteen collections of poems, as well as occasional fiction, drama and translation, Rumens has received the Cholmondeley Award and the Prudence Farmer Prize for her poetry, and was joint recipient of an Alice Hunt Bartlett Award. Her collection, Star Whisper (1983) was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Award. She has also published a collection of her lectures on poetry, Self into Song (2007). Her work has appeared regularly in publications such as The Guardian, The Observer and Poetry Review, and she currently writes the hugely popular ‘Poem of the Week’ feature for The Guardian. Her most recent poetry collections are Blind Spots (2008), De Chirico’s Threads (2010), and Animal People (2016).
