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.

Lives and Letters

Smart Devices: 52 Poems from The Guardian 'Poem of the Week'

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