Carol Rumens

Carol Rumens has always confronted the personal with the political in poems which are remarkable for their imaginative daring and their engagement with other lives. In her latest book of poems, she also stands against death itself, accepting mortality but invoking poetry's alchemical powers of extending life through memory.Hex imagines a flawed God at work on a seriously failed creation. It doesn't like the human race much either. Now and again it tries to say positive things but the overall view is God, what a mess. Surely as the shiny new millennium grinds on with blood-soaked predictability, we have to give up on any belief in the possibility of human evolution? But is there any design at all in creation? Or are we just all victims of some hex? Hex is Carol Rumens's most varied collection, written in many different voices, including a series of highly inventive 'rogue translations' of Pushkin, Akhmatova and Ovid, with Mandelstam reimagined as a South London wide boy of the 1940s. She resurrects the figure of John Constable in a group of English pastoral meditations, and gives Sylvia Plath a chance to respond in the playfully posthumous sonnets of Letters Back. This reinvented Plath is a mask, according to Lidia Vianu, 'a very Desperado device, wonderfully used...a resourceful, half-ironic, half critical dialogue with another poetic universe.'

Plato Park

Blind Spots is a masterclass of inventive, intelligent, original, and relevant modern poetry. It is divided into two parts: the first a series of 'muse' poems that are inspired by works of art and poetry, and the second includes various themes and styles.

Blind Spots

Star Whisper

Fiona Sampson

Sam Riviere

Clare Pollard

Polly Clark

George Gömöri

John Mole

Attila József

Derek Adams

John McAuliffe

Wayne Holloway-Smith

Tom Warner

Anthony Dunn

Jacqueline Gabbitas

Ágnes Lehóczky

Tim Liardet

The Balassi Institute Hungarian Cultural Centre London launched its new project ‘Inspired by Hungarian poetry: British poets in conversation with Attila József’ in celebration of the Hungarian Culture Day on 22 January 2013. On 22 January 1823 Ferenc Kölcsey – one of the most important literary fi gures in Hungarian history – completed his manuscript of the Hungarian National Anthem. Since 1989 Hungarian culture is celebrated on this day. To mark this special event, the Balassi Institute Hungarian Cultural Centre London invited British poets to contribute to its new project with a poem of their own written in response to the poems of the Hungarian poet Attila József (1905-1937). The original idea of the ‘British poets in conversation with Attila József ’ project came from Tibor Fischer, the internationally renowned British writer of Hungarian origin. The aim of the project is to raise awareness and appreciation of Hungarian poetry among readers in the UK through initiating a poetic conversation between renowned British poets and selected poems of the outstanding Hungarian poet Attila József. The Hungarian Cultural Centre asked British poets to respond to a selection of Attila József’s poems in English translation, put into English beautifully by John Bátki, Edwin Morgan, George Szirtes and Peter Zollman. The present online anthology, published on 11 April 2013 – the birthday of Attila József and the National Poetry Day in Hungary – is the product of the poetic ‘conversation’ between Attila József and more than a dozen of his present-day British counterparts. A gala reading in London on 11 April 2013 celebrates the occasion of the launch of the anthology, Attila József’s work and poetry.

British poets in conversation with Attila József

Inspired by Hungarian poetry

Collection of poems and verse-drama. Title of verse-drama: De Chirico's threads.

De Chirico's Threads

Carol Rumens

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