"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
"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."—Times Literary Supplement
Description
A Different Vision
And when the bright detail was restored,
all my senses danced, until Ravel’s
Kaddish, rinsed with too much sunshine, scalded
the morning with a blinding rain. I saw you
and I thought if only I’d been more aware
of all my retinal glitches, darnings, rainbows,
I could have seen more clearly how to love you.
What shall I do with all this finer light?
About the Author
Carol Rumens is the author of 14 collections of poems, as well as fiction, drama and translation. She has received the Cholmondeley Award and the Prudence Farmer Prize, and was joint recipient of an Alice Hunt Bartlett Award. Her most recent publication is the prose book, Self into Song, based on three poetry lectures delivered in the Bloodaxe-Newcastle University Lecture Series. She is currently professor in creative writing at Bangor University in Wales, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
