Terrific melancholy

Roddy Lumsdens 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 historys advances changeless, changeful.

Meanwhile, in the lengthy title-poem, an actors 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 Lumsdens sixth collection and it also contains a miscellany of new poems which display the writers 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.

There is a level of talent that will ransom any project in any school.

On the one hand, it will be interesting to see where Lumsden goes next; on the other, hes so good that it hardly matters D.H.

Tracy, Poetry. One of the best poets writing in English on the planet today Don Share, Squandermania.

Although the verse is hopping with linguistic antics, the foci of the language are music and rhetoric and, whip-smart as these poems are, they tend to resist chin-stroking analysisthe rhymes, the larks, the brutal punch-lines tug Lumsdens poems off the page and into the living context they describe' Matthew Smith, Verse.