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Blind spots

Part One of this collection, “Thinking About Montale by the River Hull,” attempts to splice material of various kinds (imagery, quotations, etc.) from Eugenio Montale’s Collected Poems (Tr. Jonathan Galassi) with images found in contemporary Hull, sometimes filtered through a further literary imagination, that of Philip Larkin. “Little Epic” for instance draws on Montale’s somewhat metaphorical characterisation of the eel in “l’Anguilla,” but the location of the poem is the Humber, its shores and bridge. “Shades” imagines a personal encounter with Larkin in the University Library, tracing Montale’s interpretation of the “shade” to a favourite source, Dante’s Purgatorio (Canto 21) and the poet Statius’s first meeting with Virgil.

Some research into mediaeval cosmology informed both “Little Epic” and the sestina which is the penultimate poem in Part 2 of the collection, and takes its epigraph from Dante’s “Rime Petrose”, “Walking on Hailstones.” Part Two (“Blind Spots”) includes prose-poems, further responses to Larkin and an autobiographical account of optical tests and treatment, and the relationship of compromised “normal”

vision and heightened poetic vision.

This collection is dominated by the response-poem, with poems by Montale, Dante and Larkin the main subjects of Rumens' response. Rumens also attempted to build a few poems from musical motifs and structures. “After a Deluge” (since revised) is constructed using repetands which imitate the pattern of a particular campanological sequence known as “Plain Hunt.” The “Humming Song” from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly underlies the rhythms of “Words for her Vigil”