Rumens, Carol(-Ann)
RUMENS, Carol(-Ann)
Nationality: British. Born: Carol-Ann Lumley, London, 10 December 1944. Education: St. Winifred's Convent School, London; Coloma Convent Grammar School, Croydon, Surrey, 1955–63; Bedford College, University of London, 1964–66. Family: Married David Rumens in 1965 (divorced 1985); two daughters. Career: Publicity assistant, 1974–77, and advertising copywriter, 1977–81, London; poetry editor, Quarto, London, 1981–82, and Literary Review, London, 1984–88; creative writing fellow, Kent University, Canterbury, 1983–85. Regular book reviewer, The Observer, London. Awards: Alice Hunt Bartlett award, 1982; Arts Council award, 1982; Cholmondeley award, 1984. Fellow, Royal Society of Literature, 1984. Agent: Peters, Fraser and Dunlop, 5th Floor, The Chambers, Lots Road, London SW10 0XF, England. Address: c/o Chatto and Windus, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SWIV 2SA, England.
Publications
Poetry
Strange Girl in Bright Colours. London, Quartet, 1973.
A Necklace of Mirrors. Belfast, Ulsterman, 1978.
Unplayed Music. London, Secker and Warburg, 1981.
Scenes from the Gingerbread House. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1982.
Star Whisper. London, Secker and Warburg, 1983.
Direct Dialing. London, Chatto and Windus, 1985.
Selected Poems. London, Chatto and Windus, 1987.
The Greening of the Snow Beach. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1988.
From Berlin to Heaven. London, Chatto and Windus. 1989.
Thinking of Skins: New & Selected Poems. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1993.
Best China Sky. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, and Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour, 1995.
Holding Pattern. Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 1998.
The Miracle Diet: Poems. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1998.
Play
Nearly Siberia (produced Newcastle upon Tyne and London, 1989).
Novel
Plato Park. London, Chatto and Windus, 1987.
Other
Jean Rhys: A Critical Study. London, Macmillan, 1985.
Editor, Making for the Open: The Chatto Book of Post-Feminist Poetry 1964–1984. London, Chatto and Windus, 1985.
Editor, Slipping Glances: Winter Poetry Supplement. London, PoetryBook Society, 1985.
Editor, New Women Poets. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1990.
Editor, Two Women Dancing: New & Selected Poems, by ElizabethBartlett. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, and Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour, 1995.
*Critical Study: "Women Poets and "Women's Poetry': Fleur Adcock, Gillian Clarke, and Carol Rumens" by Lyn Pykett, in British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s: Politics and Art, edited by Gary Day and Brian Docherty, London, Macmillan, and New York, St. Martin's Press, 1997.
* * *Carol Rumens wrote in a Poetry Book Society bulletin on the occasion of the publication of her first collection, Unplayed Music, "Experiencing things imaginatively as an alternative for dealing with "real' occurrences is, I suppose, an activity especially familiar to anyone who writes." Because "real" is in quotation marks, we can assume a particular meaning, which I take to be "directly experienced." It is possible (indeed it is the strength of Rumens's poetry that she does this so well) to experience imaginatively occurrences that, while not direct to the poet, were direct occurrences to others. These occurrences, while not unreal, have to be apprehended by the poet imaginatively. She goes on to say in another bulletin that "I do not belong to that school of thought which says in the face of extreme horror, suffered by others, one should be silent. On the contrary I believe that all the forces of imagination should be employed to speak of their suffering."
I labor this point because some of the most telling of Rumens's later poems have been concerned with the sufferings, horrors, persecutions, and exiles during and deriving from the history of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, subjects that many of those who lived through the period have deliberately avoided as being too immediate in their enormity and their emotional charge for what they felt would be an adequate response. That Rumens's distance from these events allows her to experience them imaginatively, and that her use of this particular aspect of the intelligence is such that the empathy she achieves in a poem such as "Outside Osweicin" is stunning, is a source of the power of her work. In the early 1980s Rumens's interest in Eastern Europe and Russia began to predominate, and it was then that she began to dare to take on subjects of such overwhelming impact.
Most of the poems in Rumens's first collection and in Star Whisper that followed display an acute observation and an ability to touch the nerves underlying the domestic and the personal. This is especially true of her love poems, where her technical accomplishment makes no small contribution to their quality and effectiveness. This quality is best illustrated by quoting what is as near a perfect poem as I have encountered in recent years, "The Last Day of March":
The elms are darkened by rain
On the small, park sized hills
Sigh the ruined daffodils
As if they shared my refrain
—that when I leave here, I lose
All reason to see you again.
What's finishing was so small,
I never mentioned it.
My time, like yours, was full,
And I would have blushed to admit
How shallow the rest could seem;
How so little could be all.
Rumens's group of love poems shares this ability to give depth of meaning and emotional truth to what are common experiences. The simply named "Love Poem" is another example of this, while "The Ballad of the Morning After" makes the connection explicit:
And that's the story of our lives,
The whole damned human race
Rumens's collection From Berlin to Heaven is of a piece with her work as a whole. As the title conveys, the poems are related to her travels but move from the basically descriptive to the metaphysical.