Carol Rumens at Poets in the Bookshop

Thursday was ‘Poets in the Bookshop’ night at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea, and Carol Rumens was reading from her work, including from her latest collection Blind Spots.  Rumens’ poems had established, canonised quotations nestled next to modern concerns, in a style that highlighted historical repetition with a light touch.  What was important to Chaucer is still important to Rumens, the only difference is that Rumens voices play out their day-to-day dramas through the chirrups and beeps of our current information technology.

Rumens seems inspired by strict poetic forms, and they highly colour her work, whether she employs them rigidly or uses them as diving boards from which to explore deviations.  I was fascinated by Rumens’ Glosa Poem on Philip Larkin‘s ‘The Trees’.  The glosa is a form which begins with a texte - a stanza from another poem, usually by another poet - and moves on to explore this original text poetically, elaborating or glossing on the first poem and using a line from the original at the end of each stanza.

Rumens has a strong, feminine voice, treating the erotic possibilities imagined in an ancient stone carving of two lovers and the starlit wonder of an early outward voyage with her granddaughter with similar fascination and tenderness.  However, Rumens is not a woman fiercely independent of the male canon.  Her literary love affair with Philip Larkin was, for me, echoed in two of the comic verses Rumens chose to read, from the point of view of a woman in love with her employer.  Rumens' relationship to the authority figures of poetry is humorous, with an impertinence that plays off against her obvious adoration.

Rumens opened the floor for the open-mic poets with another poetic love-letter to Ivan Krylov and his animal fables.  She used his comedic children’s tale of discordant animal musicians as a backdrop for her opinions on the haphazard, have-a-go attitude of major British politicians.  She explained that she was pleasantly surprised to learn that Krylov’s fables themselves had political undercurrents, and this for me triggered memories of my first adult awakening to the tales of The Brothers Grimm, the first moment when I realised that these raw and bloodthirsty folk tales were not the simple childlike fairy tales I had remembered.

Added to my ever-growing literary wishlist after this evening are:

* A copy of Krylov’s Animal Fables - seemingly not so easy to lay hands on

* Carol Rumen’s Blind Spots

* and equally Philip Larkin’s High Windows

Picador Day at Foyle's Bookshop

Picador Day at Foyle's in Charing Cross was my first glimpse of a legendary Foyle's store. The depth and range of specialist sections was enough to send me into paroxysms of book-lust, but as part of my attempts to source everything through my local library before parting with my hard-earned cash (which all belongs to The Student Loans Company anyway) I somehow managed not to spend.

Picador were displaying their latest and greatest in prose and poetry writers and I was most excited about seeing Jon Ronson whose Guardian articles I usually devour first. In the first talk, entitled Family and Self, Ronson, chosen because of his touchingly funny portrayals of the 'bubbles of madness' in his family life, bemoaned his decision to write about this close subject. It was obvious he felt awkwardly exploitative about his past column and is now concentration on journalism about the strangeness in places further afield, whilst still highlighting the reality that there is oddity and madness in any community, in any situation.

I'm excited about reading Abi Grant's Words Can Describe, about her part in the trials of her attacker years after his attempt to rape her. I am most looking forward to hearing from a woman who has been able to record her personal circumstances, a woman who very much refuses to allow herself to be written into our usual narratives about rape. She shucks off the title 'brave' with much irritation, refuting the flip side of that term, that women who cannot fight off their attackers are cowardly or even "asking for it". Her struggle to prove herself as victim conjured for me a passage in Deuteronomy, which says that if 'a man find (a damsel) in the city, and lie with her; Then ... ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel because she cried not, being in the city' (Deuteronomy 22:23-24). The onus is still on woman, in this day and age, to fight against the horror of rape.

The talks progressed through the day with Writing of Place, and Poetry and Beyond, an interesting discussion on how poetry and other literary forms inform each other or even subsume each other for the writer. In this discussion, as in the Family and Self discussion I fell in love with Jackie Kay, who read with humour and warmth from her new memoir Red Dust Road, about meeting her Nigerian father, and from her poetry collections, of which there are many which I am chomping at the bit to read. Kay brought interesting new perspectives to bear upon the discussions of writing practice, and the fear of the blank page. I scuttled off to the library on my lunch-break this Tuesday to withdraw her novel Trumpet, about a transgender musician and it is already in my big pile of current reading.

This week I have also loved:

• Exciting snippets from new writer Simon Lelic and not even published yet writer Naomi Wood


• My first ever pub quiz victory at The Victoria in Walthamstow - a lovely old East End boozer. Although I don't think a Welsh person can really say that phrase with much authenticity.


• Taking a two-hour detour on the way home to visit the swimming pool, feeling all fit and smug, only to find it closed


• Purple fingernails


• Little half hour windows of glorious sunshine in between the grey, rain-filled days