Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781781723180
Publication date: May 25, 2016
Price: £9.99
Out of stock
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781781723197
Publication date: May 25, 2016
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
‘The most striking thing about the collection is its range, its adventurousness, its willingness to go almost anywhere in the quest for a different slant on poetry’ – The North
‘This is a confronting collection, offering many challenges and no easy comforts, but it’s all the better for that. Rumens’s voice gets ever stronger, ever more arresting, and we’d do well to listen.’ – The Poetry Review
‘Animal People is a striking and powerful collection which should appeal to anyone who loves thoughtful, well-crafted poetry.’ – Orbis
Animal People is the new book of poetry from the renowned writer Carol Rumens. As the author says in her brief introduction, ‘the vertebrae of this collection are the seasons of a sometimes Welsh and sometimes English year.’ Her poems are frequently inspired by places, either wild landscapes as in ‘Fire, Stone, Snowdonia’ or urban scenes as in ‘March Morning, Pearson Park’. But just as often a setting will be a pretext for a theme that has a political, sociological, aesthetic, philosophical or even metaphysical focus.
The author is unafraid to introduce potentially controversial topics and is intrigued as much by science as history. Rumens can also effectively reach back into the past and recall vivid moments from childhood, such as ‘Austerity, 1949’. She can also produce character portraits as in ‘Happy Christmas, Sister Dympna’ and her lively ballad to Bob Dylan, ‘Happy 70th Birthday Blues, Mr Zimmerman’. Other poems start with a mythological premise and turn out to be modern morality (or immorality) tales as in ‘Her to Apollo’. Translations and/or versions inspired by other famous authors also abound as in her ‘translator’s note’ from Dante’s Divine Comedy, ‘The Red-ish Wheel-Barrow’, a borrowing from William Carlos Williams and ‘A Marshalsea Quadrille for Mr. Dickens’.
The striking final sequence, ‘On the Spectrum’, explores some of the effects and affects of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), focusing particularly on Asperger’s Syndrome and how it may be experienced by young women. Rumens opens up this topic with all her characteristic energy, empathy and curiosity. From recent research which suggests that some of these ‘autistic’ qualities may have come from the Neanderthal culture to the debatable hypothesis that AS individuals have unusual affinities with animals, there is much here that is provocative as well as lyrical. ‘We’re all animal people in the broader sense’, says the author. This beautifully intelligent collection of poetry will delight and inspire the reader.
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).
