Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 100
ISBN: 9781854115348
Publication date: June 14, 2010
Price: £8.99
Out of stock
De Chirico’s Threads, the new collection of poems from Carol Rumens features an unusual centre-piece, a verse-play, fizzing with ideas and surrealist imagery, based on the life and work of the Italian painter Georges De Chirico, as well as forty pages of distinctive and beautifully crafted individual poems by one of the UK’s best poets. An acute socio-political awareness, sometimes satirical, sometimes tender, inspires a number of pieces such as the distopian vision of ‘2084’, while ‘The Tadpole goddess’, is a clever alternative nature poem.
Her delight in form is displayed in the series ‘Six Sonnets on Petrarchan Themes’. Also here are poems about various places in London, such as the Crystal Palace rail station and ‘East Ending’ which celebrates an old music hall. Sophisticated, playful, relevant and humane, a new collection by Carol Rumens is not to be missed.
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).
