Smart Devices

52 Poems from The Guardian 'Poem of the Week'

Carol Rumens author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Carcanet Press Ltd

Published:26th Sep '19

£14.99

Available to order, but very limited on stock - if we have issues obtaining a copy, we will let you know.

Smart Devices cover

A year of hand-picked poems and commentaries from the Guardian's 'Poem of the Week' blog. Carol Rumens has been contributing 'Poem of the Week' to the Guardian for more than a dozen years. Do the maths: that's more than 624 blogs! No wonder she has a large and devoted following. She's a poet-reader, not an academic. She is fascinated by the new, but her interest is instructed by the classic poems she has read. They make her ear demanding: when it hears that something, it perks up. She perks up. 'A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.' Rumens partly agrees with Williams but she develops the conceit, seeing each poem 'as a more flexible instrument, a miniature neo-cortex, that super-connective, super-layered smartest device of the mammalian brain'. She tries to avoid poems built from kits with instruction manuals. She looks for surprises, and she surprises us.

'To judge by the insights she has into the poems of others [...] Carol Rumens is highly attuned to atmospheric variations.' - Kate Miller, TLS

ISBN: 9781784107796

Dimensions: 216mm x 135mm x 20mm

Weight: unknown

256 pages