Roddy Lumsden - Third Wish Wasted

Roddy Lumsden, Third Wish Wasted (Bloodaxe)

It's getting late. We've already reached the point at which the once young gun, Roddy Lumsden, is publishing the book after his Selected Poems and making passing reference to middle age. The blurb on the back of this volume tells us that 'it is concerned with our wishes and desires', which is fair enough, except that it doesn't really matter what poetry is about, what it says or even what it means. Especially in the hands of a poet like Lumsden, it is more a matter of what it does and how it does it. In his opening poem, envious of The Young, he describes the carefree and effortless spirit of youth in lines that might be used in appreciation of his own exuberant style,
One cartwheel over the quicksand curve
of Tuesday to Tuesday and you're gone,
summering, a ship on the farthest wave.

In many of these poems the exuberance is not a mood described or captured like off-the-peg joie de vivre but a function of the thought and language itself to the extent that in Keepsakes he is doing a passable job of being Paul Muldoon. These are linguistic performances of great erudition, intelligence and rhythm not to be confused with that genre of live stand-up called 'performance poetry'.
It's easy to list half a dozen favourite poems from this book- The Story of Spice, How the Champion Sleeps, Contagious Light, Quietus, The Damned and Tandem, for instance- without being sure you haven't missed out better ones or, for that matter, thinking that this is even Roddy Lumsden's best collection, which it might not be.
Contemporary poetry usually gets itself a bad name and one can often see how it might happen when the public are offered the dodgy doggerrel of the 'slam', a perception of a sealed-in private academic world of self-regarding highbrows or controversial publicity about bad marriages, infidelity or right-wing sympathies that lurk behind the poems in the lives of famous poets. Roddy Lumsden, if he were well-known enough, would be in danger of giving poetry a good name, with his ready wit, likeable character and impressive technique. Luckily, the good news is less likely to get out.