Smart Devices
52 Poems from The Guardian 'Poem of the Week'
Will be published approx. on 28. November 2019
Book
Paperback/Softback
256 pages
978-1-78410-779-6 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
'To judge by the insights she has into the poems of others [...] Carol Rumens is highly attuned to atmospheric variations.' - Kate Miller, TLSMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Manchester
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Carcanet Press Ltd
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 135 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-78410-779-6 (9781784107796)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
11/2019
Lives and Letters
€14.39
Available for download
Person
Carol Rumens was born in Forest Hill, South London, in 1944. She began writing music reviews for the local press when she was sixteen. She held various literary posts, including the Northern Art Fellowship, and poetry residencies located at Queen's University Belfast, University College Cork, Stockholm University and the Harvard Centre for Hellenic Studies, Nafplio. Rumens published twenty-four poetry collections, the latest of which was Mind's Eye: Notelets & Dialogues in Tribute to Paul Celan (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Professor Emerita in Creative Writing at the University of Bangor, Gwynedd. She died in April 2026.