Roddy Lumsden, Melt & Solve (Salt)In the Author's Note, Roddy Lumsden explains that he suffered concussion followed by a period of disorientation which included the loss of his creativity. To restore that, he adopted some rules to write poems in certain places, about particular occasions, even 'entertaining the idea of sentimentality'.
I thought it reminded me of the time when I played darts but then got the 'yips' and found it hard to let go and throw the darts. In the end, you just have to throw the bloody thing towards the board and see what happens. I thought perhaps these new poems might do that and have lines like, 'Since you left me have you seen me with another girl / Seeming like I'm having fun' or 'I saved the last waltz for you / Two lonely people together.' But it's not quite like that.
One part of the process of getting back to normal was 'to impersonate the person he had been' and that is what he does in these poems, too. They are still recognizably Lumsden, fractured in the early pages but gaining something like coherence as they progress, always with the proviso that Lumsden is usually a linguistic showman and not the most literal of poets, so how would we know. His poems might not always be open to interpretations that elicit a clear 'meaning', which is fine because I'm not a reader that demands one, but it is tempting to suggest that the 'melt and solve' of the title are the disorientation and the process back towards the more organized chaos of his poetry to date. This is one book, in two sections that come too close for comfort for me to have to accept that they are 'sequences' rather than long poems in parts or a series of related but separate poems.
As well as this gradual process of rediscovering his way of working, the poems have recurrent themes. He says that the surrender to sentimentality involves 'namedropping' and here an interest in Peter Greenaway's film, Drowning by Numbers, and thus the music of Michael Nyman recurs as a motif alongside Bella, the ex-girlfriend, and a deeper sense of insecurity, perhaps even anxiety and mistrust, possibly rooted in the transience of love,
Love troubles through me,
often brief, though I wish it were not so.
or,
Even the best of kisses
is improved by hindsight, and by Mozart,
no doubt, though remade till insufferably sad.
Mozart crops up more than once, as does 'Wobble' but I'm taking the wobbles to mean brief losses of newly rediscovered equilibrium and not the bass player with Public Image Limited and Invaders of the Heart but you can never be too sure nor would want to be given that the book ends with a playlist of mostly quite recherche pop music.
The sentimentality, if it needs an excuse, is predicated upon references to the painter Charles Burton Barber, as per yet another wonderfully chosen cover illustration. It doesn't need an excuse, though. It would be preferable if, in our ultra-cool, beyond-all-indulgence attitudes now, we could allow the return of some such comfort blanket. Many of us are not quite as avid fans of John Coltrane as we are expected to pretend and would be better off being able to admit a preference for Lester Young's Ghost of a Chance. For example.
On first reading, one might take this book as a self-indulgent experiment into how a compulsive writer like Lumsden slowly regained the process of moulding the protoplasm of raw language into poems but the more they are returned to, the more they solidify into something worthwhile. I've long believed that 'experimentalism' is fine but experiments that fail should be thrown away rather than published but this works. Perhaps Roddy Lumsden emerges from this crisis as a new but older, wiser and maybe sadder poet than the magician he was before. He might not have lost anything but the figure of Bella that haunts his waking moments vaguely echoes Hardy's woman much missed.
None would have noticed if poets like Housman, or the younger Geoffrey Hill, had suffered a writer's block because they produced so few poems whereas Lumsden publishes a new title every two or three years. Not All Honey was 2014, Melt & Solve is nearly a hundred pages dated 2015. You can hardly call that a hiatus but you could call it a tribute to the success of his methods of recovery. It was a necessary recuperation because if you are Roddy Lumsden and not writing poems, you are no longer Roddy Lumsden.