Roddy Lumsden books are always substantial both in length and the density of language in them. This is 100 pages of poems not at all padded out with extended discourse, recondite constructions or empty rhetoric. Every word is thought out, each poem is pared to its barest and yet still somehow baroque. It's not so much that he is prolific but bountiful, apparently a mind ever alert to the possibility of a poem and it helps if that mind is also capable of winning Round Britain Quiz.
Advice to poets is often 'make it new', 're-invent the language' and 'surprise the reader'. But if you've been surprised by the last 49 poems you have read, is it still a surprise to be surprised by the 50th. However, for all the legions of poets that are said to be 'different' and inventive in a new way but aren't really, Roddy Lumsden is the one who has always done it, is doing it and likely to keep doing it. And I have long been an admirer, still am and am likely to remain so.
As well as the notes at the end, there is a glossary of nearly two and a half pages, usefully explaining such words as 'amygdala', 'fantigue', 'pulegone' and 'stillicidal', all of which would be of use to a question setter on Call My Bluff and only a couple of which I might have known. But the linguistic ingenuity of the poems is not about the use of an esoteric lexicon. The words are enjoyed for what they are but only in the much more important context of the syntax, progress and process of the lines as they produce their delicate, explorative music. There is much more satisfaction to be had from the way that Mozart or Bach inundate the ear with ideas within a composition than those who indulge themselves with 'purer' forms of expression and Lumsden is somehow the most natural talent of his generation at doing extraordinary things in ordinary circumstances.
Women in Paintings is here, officially the best new poem I saw in 2013, and is a case in point. Then, I had thought Jill was the lady in Hockney's Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, but that is Celia Birtwell and her frock is not really steel blue. It is somebody else entirely, of course, and I'm glad of the note. If only it could have told us exactly which Corot painting he is talking about as well. But it is all in the way the gentle beauty of the 'lilac twister of a sunstreak' or the 'cape of dark around the head of an ecstatic saint' are appreciated against the undertone of vague menace in the 'clone', 'captive', 'artful lie' and 'loath core of our will'. We might be apprehensive about taking the italicized last line as a guarantee of comfort but we are comforted by art if not by life.
And perhaps would not want to be. Some of the poems have more immediate and recognizable themes than others. Towns You Only Pass Through, one might guess, could have been suggested by touring America a few years ago but passes through Northampton as well, among other English places, 'each with its microcosm of neverness', and is what Sean O'Brien might describe if he saw the grim downside with a bit more ready amazement. Whereas the poems from The Bells of Hope, 51 poems in one of Lumsden's more recently invented poetic forms, are more abstract, like small piano pieces, which were written in a 'year when, for the only time in my life, I found myself living alone'. (Oh, you poor thing, is that all you ever got). But their sadness and, is it, regret is achieved at tangents, like, in The Oratorio,
the sacred songs
of dimday grainsmen slow crossing meadows home,
which I'm sure only exchanges Gray's herdsmen for arable farmers and echoes back through the curfew. But not as much as the succinct hommage to Larkin in Lines on a Young Lady's Facebook Album. And I wonder whether it will be 'photograph' or 'Facebook' that is more likely to need a footnote in the Oxford Book of English Verse of the C23rd.
The two main sections of the book are entitled Hope versus Doubt and Doubt versus Hope, like a home and away fixture and for Roddy, as it should, it goes to penalties in The Bells of Hope where doubt prevails this time but not without hope having given a good account of itself. Of course it's not all honey but some of it still is. I saw it said once that you can only be an optimist if you're not very bright but that is not to say that the encounter can't be exhilarating.
There is plenty more to come out of this book and with Burnside, Longley, Bryce and Harsent to compare it to before, thankfully, Rosemary Tonks does not count as a book of new poems, we suddenly have quite a contest to worry about for the best collection of this year.