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Blind Spots, Carol Rumens, 2008, Seren. £8.99 ISBN 978-1-8541146-5-5

“It’s a treat to read a poet whose
Muse dances so joyfully, alongside
scholarship, through these pages.”

The blurb on the back of Carol Rumens’ new collection describes her as ‘A major voice in contemporary verse’ and I agree... she’s written some sensational poetry here, and the range of her
interests, as well as her knowledge of translation, puts this book into the top bracket.

However there are difficulties. The first third: Thinking about Montale by the River Hull, is so extraordinary I was blown away by its virtuosity. But it sets such high standards that although the second part of the book, Blind Spots, is clever and interesting, it’s not as compelling as Part I.

As Carol Rumens says at the beginning, the Montale poems are not translations, but coloured by his work, and intended as ‘an oblique homage’. All of them were written in Hull, and at times, inevitably, Philip Larkin is an acknowledged presence.

The first poem is Between Two Wars, and I was instantly entranced, as

… the poet’s senses warm themselves like mud-larks
in trivia: the reeds’ wisp-bearded profile,
Isis, tipping her slops, trampling her polythene laundry,

It’s difficult to tear oneself partway from this lovely opening piece. And the joys continue. Sessanta’s View begins:

When the moment took its blindfold from my eyes
           The town was somehow softer, shinier –
A film-set for some courtly Starlight Memories

Inspired lines and ideas keep coming in these poems. From Little Epic,

… the bridge that heron slenderness, its soaring
cruelly earthed by strings of disguised rain;

It’s a treat to read a poet whose Muse dances so joyfully, alongside scholarship, through these pages. The references are fine and useful.

The first poem in Part II, Blind Spot, still has some Montale magic. Second Heart, begins

I grope back;
tearing through the web of sixty years –

my webbed, sixty-years-old, beginning-to-tear hand –

past the spinning figures
of the nearly-young, who jump away
to the trembling edges, afraid,
a little afraid they might see themselves inside it…

After this point in the book, work has crept in that does not have the gold dust of Montale sprinkled over it so freely. However there are still treasures to be found: Clothes left on a Washing-Line was written in the Gaza Strip, in 2005 and gathers the reader in –

… We hung, collars down, in the usual manner,
motionless in the sun, our dyes blazing …

A few pages on, I’m charmed again by a poem On the Merits of Drifting Off, which quotes a sentence from William Carlos Williams as its starting point: “there can be no part (in a poem) that is redundant”.

Carol Rumens begins:

Let there be lapses, little wanderings-off
Where the form’s soul pulses behind her eyelids,

and so on with a delightful 10 line musing on this subject.

There are sad Waiting Room poems, what she calls an ‘Arty Eclogue’ and other pleasing poems throughout the rest of the collection, some exciting prose poems, some accomplished traditional forms. But it’s the first poems in this exciting collection that I return to for magic.