Hex

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.'