British poet Carol Rumens, whose Guardian poem of the week column ran for nearly 20 years and was beloved among its loyal readership, has died aged 81.
Her family said that she died peacefully on 25 April, after being diagnosed with a brain tumour.
Rumens’ poems, often profoundly political, were published across more than a dozen collections, including Animal People, De Chirico’s Threads and Blind Spots. She also wrote plays, fiction, criticism and published poetry in translation.
She began writing the Guardian poem of the week column in October 2007. Over two decades, she developed an engaged readership, responding to each column in the comments section.
Rumens was born on 10 December 1944 in Forest Hill, south London. She began a philosophy degree, but left before finishing it and later received a postgraduate diploma in writing for stage from City College Manchester.
Her first collection, A Strange Girl in Bright Colours, was published in 1973. In the mid-70s, she worked as an editor on Croydon-based magazine Pick, before becoming poetry editor at Quarto and Literary Review in the early 80s.
Through the 80s, she published several collections, including Star Whisper, The Greening of the Snow Beach and her first volume of selected poems. She also collaborated on the first of several translated volumes of poetry from Russian, by poets including Evgeny Rein and Irina Ratushinskaya. Poetry in translation “revitalises our daily, cliche-haunted vocabulary”, Rumens wrote in 2007. “It extends us in the way real travelling does, giving us new sounds, sights and smells.”
Rumens taught at a number of universities, including the University of Hull, where she established an MA in creative writing, and the University of Bangor, where she was a longtime visiting professor.
The poet was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984. She was shortlisted for the Forward poetry prize for best single poem twice, and the same year, she won a Society of Authors Cholmondeley award.
Her first Guardian poem of the week choice in was Far Rockaway by the Welsh-language poet Iwan Llwyd, translated by Robert Minhinnick. Over the following two decades, she would write nearly 1,000 columns, featuring poems by household names in between those of lesser-known writers.
For her final column, published in February, she chose two poems by Matthew Rice. In the comments section, one reader thanked her for her “usual great choice of poems and erudite introduction”.
In 2019, a collection of 52 poem of the week columns and their accompanying commentaries were published in a book titled Smart Devices.
“I’m still surprised to find myself writing a weekly blog at all,” Rumens wrote in 2019. She described feeling “electrified” by the research process behind the columns. “To lift off from the launching pad of a poem, and bounce and float through the galaxies of Search, learning bits and pieces which ought to be unrelated but which mesh because I am their narrator, is as exciting as the process of writing a poem – and, in fact, remarkably similar to it.”
Taking on the column, “I think I wanted to learn how to think about poems, as well as find out what I thought of them,” she continued. “That’s the selfish, self-loving bit. The more altruistic motive is that I feel poets owe each other (or each other’s poems) a duty of care. One person can’t do very much but they can do something, make a few sounds to erase the stupid silence which hangs around poems and collections of poems.
“I’m sick of hearing that too much poetry is written and published. No, too little poetry is taught and read. A poem isn’t usually a butterfly or a mobile phone. It deserves a longer life. I wish I wrote better about poems and poetry, but I know I should go on writing, any way, as best I can.”
