It’s always an exciting day in the Poetry Wales office when the Forward Prize longlist email arrives in our editor’s inbox, and this June we were particularly pleased to see Carol Rumens‘ name on the list for her poem ‘Appropriations’, which we published in our Winter 2025 issue, Home & Resilience. Last week the Forward Prize announced Carol on their list of Highly Commended poets in the Best Single Poem category.
To celebrate not only this achievement but also the legacy of Carol’s work as a poet, we’re sharing the full poem here.
Hafez, the stars are coming out
in all the windows of your bakery –
scrambling, banging, twisting happy high-fives
or bunches of anger.
One offers – like a mouth
or window-cleaner’s wash-rag –
an empty, crumpled, barely
bread-sized paper bag. It melts
in rounds of lead. The stars are falling
shreds of wet dough, the wine of lifelines
and heart-lines runs all over.
The hands are swallowed up in the dense snow
of flour and window-glass, a few are found
charred near the gas-less ovens.
You couldn’t put an ounce of bread in the hands.
We mustn’t put words in your mouth,
Hafez, by pretending you could have sung
nightingales into theirs.
Note: Hafez, the mediaeval Persian poet, worked as a baker before he became a Sufi sage.
Self-described as “someone who loves language, and who tries to make various things with it,1” Carol Rumens was born in Forest Hill in South London, studied Philosophy at London University, and eventually gained a Postgraduate Diploma in Writing for the Stage from City College Manchester. She taught at several universities, including Queen’s University Belfast, University of Stockholm, the University of Hull and University of Bangor. She was Poetry Editor for Quarto and the Literary Review and ran the popular Poem of the Week column for the Guardian from 2007 – 2026. She published multiple poetry collections with Quartet, Bloodaxe, Seren Books and others. As well as writing poetry, Carol wrote one novel – Plato Park – and a number of plays.
