Literary reviews by Tim Love.
Warning: Rather than reviews, these are often notes in preparation for reviews that were never finished, or pleas for help with understanding pieces. See Litref Reviews - a rationale for details.
Showing posts with label 'The Book of Love'. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 'The Book of Love'. Show all posts

Sunday, 18 October 2009

"The Book of Love" by Roddy Lumsden (Bloodaxe, 2000)

Many neat pieces with some variety - "An Older Woman" has 14 lines all ending with an "er" sound; "Love's Young Dream" is a sonnet (that depends heavily on the punchline), etc. Shorts like "For the Birds" and "The Twelth Kind" work well for me. He breaks into prose-format when appropriate though maybe not enough - "East of Eden" is prose dressed as Sonnet, and "Bellyful" is prose with a beat. I didn't get "The Beginning of the End" or "Lullaby". I was puzzled by "The Boyhood of Fulcanelli" until I discovered the notes at the end of the book. I liked the longer "Sweltering" ("the body's just a cinema for genes"), though the notes say that "the parts were originally written so as to be read in any sequence"