Carol Rumens obituary

Poet, poetry editor and writer of the Guardian’s long-running Poem of the Week column

Carol Rumens, who has died aged 81 after suffering from a brain tumour, was an inventive, discursive and cosmopolitan poet as well as a generous champion of poetry in her long-running weekly Guardian column. A recipient of the Cholmondeley award in 1984 and twice shortlisted for the Forward prize for best single poem, she also worked across several other genres with much success, publishing a novel, plays, translations, monographs and journalism.

Rumens’ skill as an educator and reader of poems, as well as her expertise in the craft, and her breadth of interest, were all brought to bear on her Poem of the Week column for the Guardian, which she began writing in October 2007 and continued until February this year. Here she introduced and unpacked the work of established and new poets, with incisive, expert guidance on navigating the poems’ shapes, sounds and contexts, and a deep engagement with readers’ comments. A selection of 52 of these poems and commentaries were collected as a book, Smart Devices, published by Carcanet in 2019.

Rumens’ first poetry collection, A Strange Girl in Bright Colours, was published in 1973, and her own writing was, from the off, a sophisticated blend of competing impulses. The influence of Philip Larkin was detectable in some of her early poetry, not least in her use of formal structures and the blending of a musical lyricism with occasional turns towards the pointedly demotic, as in Coming Home (1981):

The bar is full of English cigarette smoke
and English voices, getting louder
– a language lumpy as a ploughed field.
It’s hard to believe our tongues have got it too.

However, unlike the anglocentric Larkin, Rumens often drew explicitly on European culture and poetry, particularly eastern European writing. From the beginning her poems, while rooted in contemporary phrasing and urbanity, were haunted by the long view and by political history, often allowing ideas of the unspoken or occluded to add further shade and depth. As in her 1993 poem The Émigrée, one is regularly aware in her work that “time rolls its tanks / and the frontiers rise between us”.

Her poems were often a means of bearing witness, as she noted in an interview with the Poetry Book Society: “I do not belong to that school of thought which says in the face of extreme horror, suffered by others, one should be silent. On the contrary I believe that all the forces of imagination should be employed to speak of their suffering.”

Tom Paulin, reviewing Direct Dialling (1985) in the London Review of Books, identified her “unsettling combination of west European angst and east European social reality”, as well as her “terse intelligence” and insistence on “giving emotions a social dimension”. This social dimension was never only a historical one; Rumens always worked with a feminist lens, laying bare the various hypocrisies and inheritances that had shaped life for women looking to forge new paths in the 1970s and 80s, as in Rules for Beginners (1981): “She got a part-time job at the Disco / Behind the bar. A neighbour had the children. / Now she knew all about being an adult / And, honestly, it wasn’t very nice.”

In the 80s Rumens became involved in an underground publishing scene populated with Russian dissidents, and visited Russia several times on cultural exchanges as a poet, carrying extra suitcases stuffed with warm clothes and basic provisions for struggling families in Moscow and what was then Leningrad.

Her interest in Russian poetry resulted in her translating a number of Russian writers, including Irina Ratushinskaya and Yevgeny Rein. Some of this was carried out with her long-term partner, Yuri Drobyshev, whom she met in 1985, himself a Russian poet and translator. His death in 2015 prompted Rumens to publish a pamphlet of elegies about being “not quite a widow”, Bezdelki, which won the Michael Marks award for best pamphlet in 2018 and exemplified Rumens’ skill at turning the ordinary objects of a life into totems ripe for memorialisation. It also underlined that, as well as being a poet of the social and political, she was a poet of love and human connection.

One of the poems, Nant y Garth, demonstrated a faith in poetry’s power to create a form of afterlife, at least on the page:

I could no more believe the sap insensible
than I believe the dead are broken branches,
and all their self-songs censored or extinguished.

Rory Waterman, reviewing Bezdelki in PN Review, noted: “Rumens can subtly fill a poem with so much hard-edged meaning that it feels like the sudden bursting of a dam,” a verdict that might apply to her entire body of work.

Born in Forest Hill, south London, Carol was the only child of Marjorie (nee Mills) and Wilfred Lumley. Wilfred had been a naval officer during the second world war and worked until his retirement as a broker at a marine transportation company in east London. Marjorie was a homemaker and later a secretary in an insurance company.

Carol attended Coloma Convent grammar school in Croydon. She began studying philosophy at King’s College London but left before graduating; she later received a postgraduate diploma in writing for stage from City College Manchester.

In the 70s she worked for the Croydon Advertiser and as a copywriter for an advertising agency. She also began to take up literary roles, at the Croydon-based literary magazine Pick, later as poetry editor at Quarto and the Literary Review, and founding and co-editing Brangle, a magazine based in Belfast, in 1993.

Additionally she was an editor of anthologies, including Making for the Open: The Chatto Book of Post-Feminist Poetry (1985) and New Women Poets (1990). She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984.

Rumens acted as writer-in-residence at a number of institutions, including Queen’s University Belfast, University College Cork, Stockholm University and latterly as a visiting professor of creative writing at the University of Bangor and the University of Hull.

A marriage, to David Rumens, a chess master, began in 1964 and ended in divorce in 1984; they had two daughters, Kelsey and Rebecca, who survive her, along with two grandchildren, Isabella and Sam.

• Carol Ann Rumens, poet, born 10 December 1944; died 25 April 2026