The Round Britain Quiz star retains an inordinate amount of detail and his poetry similarly teems with invention, innovation, technique, esoteric knowledge as well as a penchant for the Chinese horoscope and the fragile nature of relationships.
I began at the beginning, which I don't always, and read the first section of the three in page order, feeling no need to flick forward in search of something more interesting. His idiosyncratic style forever ducks expectation, defies received ideas of what poetry should be. He did suggest a few years ago that the coming generation of poets were the best/greatest/most exciting (delete those he didn't say) ever in English poetry, which I took to mean those he had coached on Creative Writing courses, but I don't think they are. They might have been if he could genuinely bequeath his gift but he can't and most of them don't possess anything like it.
I'm rarely sure why poetry collections are divided into sections. I imagine it's thematic and I can see the second section, A Soft Leviathan, made up of the 'conflation poems in which he 'has knocked the square peg of one subject through the round hole of another', which is as maybe but the poems I've noted down as most worthy of comment come from the first and third parts.
Simone's Cookie is phenomenology, if not ontology, not letting us in gently by introducing Kierkegaarrd as an early gambit. And,
you remember awfulness, a sad station
you once waited on, or the acre of chaos
which pretends to be our understanding.
This might be advertised as Lumsden's most optimistic book for some time but the confidence is in the shifting, elusive bravura of the poems, the trains of thought and the apparently bottomless resource of telling lines rather than in the account of discomfiting life as it is lived that they serve.
Page 16 is an uninhibited tribute to, and consideration of forms of coitus, beautiful in its way but I'm still with those who were reluctant to translate Catullus 16 for schoolchildren and there are enough other pieces to enthuse about more.
Elba is the poem I've returned to most often, exile being a powerful theme in poetry from before Homer and Ovid, and no less rich in potential now. For Napoleon here, solipsism or something like it is both a trap and a source of unlikely freedoms.
Treason was impossible.
What won me was simplicity, the sweeping,
the bed-making, the birdless birdcage gaping.
It would diminish Roddy Lumsden to categorize him as avant-garde and it is such more accessible poems that his use of the language is seen to best effect but many admirers of 'mainstream' poetry are going to find some poems difficult. He's not as difficult as Geoffrey Hill, who insisted on it, but like Michael Donaghy, Paul Muldoon or Don Paterson, it's not of interest how avant-garde it is. If that is all there is to discuss about poetry then it must be missing something. There isn't time to whittle ourselves over labels that others have made it their raison d'etre to prove themselves to be.
Work Crush is a brilliant piece that understands office life as well as The Office itself did.
Our lives would lift
into that starling swarm of whatever.
I barely know you and yet you may
be welcome at my funeral, karaokeing
my best song.
Even that 'my best song' is the demotic, grammatically incorrect usage that means his favourite song rather than the best he ever wrote.
On second reading, some of the poems didn't seem to have the same immediate impact as when one didn't know what to expect but staying with it and winnowing a generous full-length collection down to the handful of those shortlisted for masterpiece status, those are the poems you buy books in the hope of finding - nobody writes masterpieces all the time - and the book is a palpable hit.
This is Roddy's tenth book, it says. I don't have all of them, I don't suppose, and I had begun to wonder if anybody needs more than one because they all provide similar elusiveness of meaning in places, enough to puzzle on what they mean, if anything, and whether or not it always works. But you do need several, this one as much as any, because there are great things to be had. It's not easy being a poet these days, avoiding all the obvious pitfalls in an industry overcrowded with dedicated artists who all think it's about them but without enough consumers to buy all the available product. Should it be reportage from the front-line of one's own life, giving biographers licence to relate every line to some trauma or idiosyncracy or should it be classical art for art's sake. It doesn't matter. It would be very odd if it were entirely one or the other.
Roddy Lumsden remains one ahead of the game, still clear of the pack, good at doing his own thing, there is also a confident suspicion that the poems would achieve another level if heard read aloud by him -the page being a democratic but sometimes deadening stage for some poetry- and there's not many you can say all that about.
