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Carol Rumens is originally from South London and now lives in North Wales, where she teaches creative writing at Bangor University. She has published sixteen collections of poetry, most recently Animal People (Seren, 2016). Her work appears in many anthologies, including The Best British Poetry (2014) and The Forward Anthology (2016). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Emma Dai'an Wright is a British-Chinese-Vietnamese publisher and illustrator. She worked in ebook production at Orion Publishing Group before leaving in 2012 to set up The Emma Press with the support of the Prince's Trust. She has since published over 500 writers across more than 130 books, including poetry anthologies for adults and children, short stories, and translations. She lives in Birmingham. Rachel Piercey is a poet and editor who also writes for children. Her poems have appeared in magazines including Magma, The Rialto, Poems In Which, Butcher’s Dog and The Poetry Review and she has two pamphlets with the Emma Press, The Flower and the Plough and Rivers Wanted. https://www.rachelpierceypoet.com/<p>A reflection upon memory and the mortal condition, Rumens draws from a range of cultural touchstones, including historical imaginings of the afterlife. </p>
- Poetry Book Society, PBS Bulletin
In Carol Rumens's Bezdelki, small things like the English meaning of her Russian title help to shore up the memory of a life. These elegies for a late partner, written in memory of Yuri Drobyshev, explore the principle that death, even for atheists, isn’t purely loss. Instead, a kind of conversation between two people can be continued through willed acts of memory, whether by rooting through incidental artefacts found in a toolbox ('defiant old metals, coupled/irrefutably and awkwardly for life') or by revisiting works of Russian literature that both members of the couple admired. In Rumens's pamphlet, translations and imitations of Osip Mandelstam share space with fragments of Egyptian mythology and 'a wardrobe of old sweat-shirts' to convey the powerful, and moving, impulse to 'live with your death unburied at my core'.
In Carol Rumens’s Bezdelki, small things help to shore up the memory of a life. These elegies for her late partner, Yuri Drobyshev, explore the principle that death – even for atheists – isn’t purely loss. Instead, a kind of conversation between two people can be continued through willed acts of memory, whether by rooting through a toolbox or by revisiting well-loved books. Bezdelki shares with us this moving, many-textured communication.