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