I'm pleased to find this poem is on the internet. It is very much a contender for my Best Poem of the Year. So far, at least. I can hardly see it not being on my own short list even if I have some other candidates and there's a whole book of Kleinzahler due in October.
http://edinburgh-review.com/extracts/poetry-women-in-paintings-roddy-lumsden/
And when I say 'Best', I mean how am I supposed to know what is the best. I mean I like it best, probably of anything else I've read this year.
And so, why do I like it so much.
To be frugally honest about it, I've seen a number of poems I have liked so far this year but not so many that make me think they are of classic status. It was ever thus. But it does mean that 'best' is best when not necessarily up against a very strong field. But I do like the poem the more I look at it and more than when I first saw it several weeks ago.
I like the understatement of its fine music. It hides its virtues a little bit, the more that they might satisfy on discovery. It rhymes but you might not know it; it has internal rhyme here and there that the reader is welcome to disregard. It is about other art, but not only about other art; it summarizes and yet is particular. In the space of 12 lines it makes me stop to admire several times and yet you must read on, thus you need to read it twice each time, once stopping to admire and once never doing so, with all those things understood. Or as many of them as I like to think I have found. I'm sure there are more. A good poem is always withholding more than one has found in it, one would like to think.
And it is a sort of bravura. Lines like,
a lilac twister
of a sunstreak, through which the bonneted girl
is ever about to step,
so that, yes, poetry in our day and age can still be simply lovely and not just clever.
I could go on but won't.
Another good thing about it is that Mr. Lumsden is clearly still at the height of his powers and I like seeing that in the poets that I regard as my favourites. It is poems like this that remind me why I still read it while I still read it.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
