Singing About Melon opens with a call for silence: 'Silenzio'. This is the self-defeating shout of the guards in the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, where several of the poems are placed. It is a call that echoes through Luke Thompson's first collection, playing with sense and nonsense, the sayable and the unsayable, as well as the saying that un-says.Eels, anchorites, parrots, invertebrates, a ventriloquist's dummy and a mechanical squirrel are all deployed in this exploration of sense and silence through themes of bodily identity, grief, the divine and other species. "A rare book - both strange and exhilarating; poems which bore and drill into the reader's mind much like the earthworms, eels and other tiny guests vibrating on the pages." --Mona Arshi. "Skilfully precise and playfully mischievous, these poems embrace the spiritual, the cartoonish and everything in between with a mindful sensibility." --Isabel Galleymore
