Roddy Lumsden - Böcker

Two words, hope and doubt, dominate Not All Honey, the seventh full collection by Roddy Lumsden. These awkward cousins appear repeatedly as the poet 'fathoms the ingredient for happy' despite a tendency for the 'terrific melancholy' which named his last book. Roddy Lumsden is one of the most inventive poets writing today, always keen to explore and invent forms and to challenge the musical limits of language. The collection veers between sequence and stand-alone poems, the recurring subjects including viscous liquids, popular music, folkloric beasts and relationships and friendships with younger people. This book also reproduces Lumsden's acclaimed limited edition short collection The Bells of Hope which, in 51 short and exuberant 'kernel poems', records the poet's first ever year lived alone. Shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Poetry Book of the Year.

So Glad I'm Me was Roddy Lumsden's tenth collection, and sadly turned out to be the last book he published. In these haunting poems he returned to familiar themes in his work: the trials of oneness versus twoness, the seduction of small calamities, and vice versa. And the everyday mysteries, of running water, salt and sugar, roller-skates and back-up flats. So Glad I'm Me also contains many 'conflation poems' where he has knocked the square peg of one subject through the round hole of another, often music-related. There are poems here about many songs and musicians, ranging from cult artists like Alex Chilton and Robin Holcomb to big names like Elvis and Morrissey. As ever, he relishes unusual words (nestlecock, twofer, farnesol) and interesting, taut forms, alongside a new strand of mid-length, discursive pieces in the spirit of Chicagoan poets Albert Goldbarth and Marianne Boruch. So Glad I'm Me was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize 2017 and the Saltire Society Scottish Poetry Book of the Year Award 2018.

In 2013 the poet Roddy Lumsden suffered a serious concussion. The head injury left him devoid of creativity, impersonating himself in an effort to rediscover his own identity. Four months later, a late night conversation led to a radical experiment that would see him return to writing with a daring project. This book is that extraordinary work.As the poet says, “The series of plaintive poems entertains the idea of sentimentality. It encourages fetishes, by which I mean repeated references and name dropping. It is 'hand on heart' stuff. Sweeping, indulgent last lines, often. Emotional, evoking the mood I found myself in as I recovered, solved.”

Roddy Lumsden was one of Britain's liveliest and most inventive poets of recent times. From the formal, frenetic debut Yeah Yeah Yeah, through the playful wit and cynicism of The Book of Love, to the ‘magnificent song to himself’ of Roddy Lumsden is Dead, this retrospective of his earlier work shows how his poetic journey was eventful, fuelled by his fascination with the intrigues of men and women and the short steps from real life to folklore to the surreal. Mischief Night brought together the best work from Roddy Lumsden’s three previous collections, as well as a whole new collection, The Drowning Man. It also contains poems from his pamphlet The Bubble Bride and the previously uncollected sonnet sequence Cavoli Riscaldati. It was followed by four later collections. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

"Third Wish Wasted" is a book concerned with our wishes and desires. Belonging to a world between real and imagined folklore, the poems are by turns celebratory, humorous and beguiling, and there are bittersweet contemplations of youth, beauty and fame. Roddy Lumsden is one of the liveliest and most inventive poets writing in Britain today. His fifth collection sees him extending the range of his poetry, straying into denser and more musical territory, as well as sticking with the form and wit which typifies his earlier work. In "Third Wish Wasted" he invents and tries out various unusual and inventive forms such as charismatics, overlays and relegated narratives. There are poems composed on a top fashion shoot, inspired by travels in the USA and, as ever, he picks apart the problems between men and women.

Identity Parade presents new British and Irish poetry at a time of great vibrancy and variety. It is the first anthology to comprehensively represent the generation of poets who have emerged since the mid-1990s. Eclectic, diverse and wide-ranging in scope, the book fully reflects the climate of "the pluralist now". It offers the work of 85 highly individual and distinctive talents whose poems display the distinctive breadth of styles and approaches characteristic of our current poetry. These writers are prospering all over Britain and Ireland - from Shetland to Aberystwyth, from Gravesend to Galway - as well as further afield. Many new and undersung poets appear alongside this generation's most celebrated names, and probably for the first time in any major poetry anthology, more women writers than men are featured. All the poets have either published first collections within the past 15 years or make their debut within the next year. Identity Parade is as accessible to the new reader as to the aficionado, with each poet introduced by a biographical note also covering their themes and concerns, plus an author photograph. This is the essential starting place for anyone interested in the poetry of here and now.

Roddy Lumsden's Terrific Melancholy is a book of changes, physical and emotional. It begins with a diverse sequence on that most dubious and folkloric of changes, rebirth into a new life, exploring our history's advances - changeless, changeful. Meanwhile, in the lengthy title-poem, an actor's reluctant crush on a younger colleague leads him to look back on life from middle age, while the poet himself does the same during travels in the USA. This is Lumsden's sixth collection and it also contains a miscellany of new poems which display the writer's acclaimed inventiveness with form and structure and his breadth of approaches: satire, listing, praise poems and a new form, the 'ripple poem', which develops the use of 'fuzzy' rhyme.