LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

CAROL RUMENS (b. 1944) is a Slav sensibility in the Desperado vein. She is British – born and bred – but her soul must have been able to speak Russian in another life, if we go by her unique compassion and understanding for life under communism, especially in the Soviet Union, where she travelled and about which journey she wrote at length. A Moscow Wife, Waiting reminds the reader of Solzhenitsyn and the political concentration camps. The poet is one of the very few who, although totally strangers to Russian realities, can identify at once with the harsh reality of communism, conveying an insight that even Russians might find it hard to summon. Her eye for the essential lyrical feature of the incidents she writes about is impressive:

Husbands wait sometimes, too:

But when I think of waiting,

I think only of you,

As if you were the true                                    

Symbol of all waiting

And all who wait are you,

Larissa. And I see                                                                                                     

The blackish lumps of snow

Surging to your dark porchway,

The flats in rows, the stairs

In hundreds, and I climb

Praying you'll be there,

Praying you won't be there.

I hear the clattered chains –

It's like a prison-door.

You peep an inch. I'm scared

I've scared you – and just scared.

But then – I've stepped inside.

You sit and listen, pale

Distracted. You look ill.

The message falters. No,

It isn't much. I can't

Say much. And there's a word

Which you repeat and which

Baffles me. That it means

The most important thing

For you is all I know.

‘I’m sorry.' I bring out

My pocket dictionary.

The word is amnesty.

'You said 'I think there's hope.'

You didn't smile. I said

'I'm glad.' The words seemed small.

I took your hand, I went

Into the sleety cold.

And now I learn that hope

Was simply one more way                                                                                                            

Of torturing you: they've sent                                                                      

Your husband back to camp.

And yes, he's waiting, too;

But when I think of waiting

Somehow I think of you

As if you were the true                                                                                                

Symbol of all waiting,                                                                                                     

And all who wait are you.

Love, with Carol Rumens, is a full, deep glow, total communion, happiness unuttered but definitely there. She is a fulfilled poet, both verbally and emotionally (even when she writes about absence or dead love), and her reader feels immensely at peace. Housewarming describes the man the poet is waiting for by his absence:

it's a strange thing, a soul:

A kind of hollow shining, a choked cry.

Love is an ageless feeling, always there and always shared. Pietas is ample proof of Rumens’ rich, voluptuous peace:

Failed curls, limp breasts, no waist – and I'm trembling, because

I'm seventeen and everything's possible.

Then, in an after-flash, I see my flesh unchosen.

Your eyes tell me I'm lovely, so nobody else's can.

Swedish Exchange does not even bother with the convention of lines or rhymes. It is true that there is an unmistakable Carol Rumens rhythm in the sentences. Lyricism comes out of the angle from which the incident is retold – with exquisite obliqueness – and from the details chosen, which are all suggestive of love again, and of age, of becoming an alien from oneself as time goes by. Unlike poems written in stanzas, this poem with paragraphs is impossible to sum up, prosey as it may look. Nothing more than a departure is retold, but so much more is understated. Perfect communion is Carol Rumens’ greatest image, with a hundred faces, from a hotel room to the door of a Russian prisoner’s wife. We can safely say that love is the synonym of life for this poet.

Portrait of God as a Creative Writing Student, besides the irony which is not Carol Rumens’ forte, describes rhymes as ‘loud self-mockery’. Whether rhyme is used by God – whom Carol Rumens imagines herself teaching how to write – or by a mortal poet, it is equally undesirable for this poet who finds her effects in a music of feeling rather than sounds. She has a gift for the loving word, for the word-of-the-soul which most Slav poets are born into.

In spite of the fact that we learn all about the poet’s soul, Carol Rumens is the shyest of poets: she never utters ‘I love you’, she never crushes the emotion by labelling it with words. In Letter she can only bring herself to say that ‘the heart’s room (...) may have no end’. Love for the mother is described in The Fitting Room in very unexpected rhymes for this most musical poet who rejects classical tools, who rejects the obvious music in favour of the inner harmony of the heart. The first stanza rhymes a-c, b-d, e-g,

f-j, h-i. The third stanza changes the pattern to a-c, b-i, d-g, e-f, h-j. The rhymes are sometimes perfect, at other times half-correct, but their matching does not affect the meaning much. The intensity of the feeling of loss and yet endurance by far surpasses the faint glimmer and games of words.