Popular Poet and blogger publishes

Poet Carol Rumens, Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the School of Languages, Literatures & Linguistics closes 2019 with two well-received recently published books.

The Mixed Urn (Sheep Meadow Press, USA) is her twentieth collection of poetry. These new poems have garnered great reviews, including the following:

“Carol Rumens is one of the few women poets writing today whose seriousness is absolute but not closed; whose political beliefs are so enmeshed with her intelligence and sympathetic passions that it is impossible to consider the state of contemporary poetry in Britain without taking her work into account. . . . She retains her feminine voice, but extends her sympathies beyond feminism in sinewy but heart-piercing poems”.-Anne Stevenson, author of About Poems: And How Poems Are Not About

The Times Literary Supplement review said this of Carol Rumens in their review:

“She is a European poet whose imagination goes beyond the confines of Europe, a poet of borders and transit, and the movement across frontiers which makes both the experience of alienation and that of home a relative matter.”

Smart Devices (Carcanet Press, Manchester) is a collection of 52 of Carol’s popular 'Guardian' Poem of the Week poetry blogs, plus the poems. In the 12 or so years she has been contributing her blog, Carol has reviewed some 624 poems, including the classics and new writing. Her blog has grown a large and devoted following.

Poets featured include Tony Conran, Naomi Foyle, Ian Gregson, Anne Stevenson, Karen McCarthy Woolf and W S Graham. Both Tony Conran and Ian Gregson have strong Bangor associations, having been past members of staff at the School of English (as was) while Naomi Foyle, a senior lecturer at Chichester University, gained her PhD under Carol Rumens at Bangor University.

Carol Rumens spent much of the spring and summer reading hundreds of new poems and poetry collections, as one of the five adjudicators of the Forward Prize Awards. This year’s winners were Fiona Benson, Best Collection, Vertigo and Ghost; Stephen Sexton, Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection for If all the world and love were young and Parwana Fayyaz, Best Single Poem for Forty Names.

“I know that I love reading and writing poetry because the activities let me enjoy words without having to march them in completely logical lines,” she says.

Publication date: 18 December 2019