Carol Rumens Biography

British poet, born in Lewisham, London, educated at Bedford College, University of London. She became poetry editor of the Literary Review in 1982; she is also active as a teacher of creative writing. A Strange Girl in Bright Colours (1973) was her first collection of poetry; subsequent volumes include A Necklace of Mirrors (1978), Unplayed Music (1981), Star Whisper (1983), Direct Dialling (1985), Selected Poems (1987), From Berlin to Heaven (1989), and Thinking of Skins: New and Selected Poems (1993). Many of her earlier poems combined precisely observed imagery, sardonic humour, and remarkable candour in their treatments of domestic and suburban experience. From Star Whisper onward her work displays an intensifying imaginative involvement with modern European history; numerous memorable poems of suffering and persecution include the tragically elegiac treatments of the Nazi Holocaust in ‘Outside Osweicim’ and ‘A New Song’. Plato Park (1987), her first novel, is largely set in Moscow. Among her other publications is Jean Rhys: A Critical Study (1985). She edited Making for the Open: The Chatto Book of Post-Feminist Poetry (1987), and New Women Poets (1990).