"Roddy Lumsden is dead" by Roddy Lumsden (Wrecking Ball Press, 2001)

Poems from Magma, Poetry Review, Snakeskin, TLS, Verse, etc. In the first section all the titles begin with "My" - e.g. My pain. In the notes he mentions his depersonalisation problems and writes that these earlier poems are "an attempt to make some sense of that loss of identity and temporary death of selfhood."

The poems are accessible, with insights and witty turns of phrase, though it seems to me that if he has 3 ideas he writes 3 poems rather than a single, more intense piece. "My Prayer" for example ends with "please may/ the emotional tourist in each one of us/ cast anchor in a sun-spoilt bay", but the 10 lines leading up to that do little. Similarly "Escher". I prefer "My Solitude" or "The Lost Boys".

He's also good at eking out the most from lists ("The Cola Venus") and chains of ideas ("Underground Literature"). He uses rhyme sometimes, often rather loosely.

Other reviews

• Clare Pollard(None of our most established poets, from Duffy to Motion, has laid bare skeletons, vulnerability or pain in their oeuvre, and the idea of writing to come to terms with personal events has come to be perceived as almost the hallmark of amateurism ... Whilst his poetry is technically dazzling, and packed with beautiful and unexpected lines, he often appears to have a paucity of content. This may be linked to his prolific output, and the fact poetry seems to come as easily to him as talking - he often appears determined to work even the most insignificant image or idea into a poem. The second section of Roddy Lumsden is Dead, 'But Sweet,' contains a number of 'throwaways' that could easily have been cut to produce a stronger collection. ... part of the reason why the second section seems weak is because it is an irrelevancy after the dazzling title sequence that makes up the first half of the book. This would have been a strong collection in itself (at 58 pages), and in its urgency, highlights the slightness of the other work.)

"Not all honey" by Roddy Lumsden (Bloodaxe, 2014)

Over 100 pages of poetry. My eyes passed over it all, but I didn't read it carefully. I didn't know how to. Disparate elements seem stuck together in a manner reminding me of the US Elliptical school. Sometimes a fragment works unaided, sometimes they work in association with others, but much more often they look to me as if they're fragments hopefully shuffled and dealt out.

There's a glossary over 2 pages long giving definitions. It's useful for poems that kick off like this, with 3 unusual words -

Ichor A thumbs down to piling on, to the fist over fist of little England's schwa, its terrace svarabhakti, a bawling pusher-in you'd finger in the line-up.

There are also over 2 pages of notes. There are no notes for "Towns You Only Pass Through", though it might have embedded notes - "Newark and Stevenage, fetish settlements/ for the passer through, each with its microcosm/ of neverness, model villages helium pumped/ till bachelors and long lost women parade/ their shadowier provinces, seeking orange juice/ or scourers or the last paper plates in the store./ Make my point? Oh, it is that there is not one".

In my old fashioned way I prefer bits liked these -

• "Sometimes you step out for that missing stair/ and find it's there" (p.15)
• "There comes a day when you realise/ El Greco lived long before the sugar cube" (p.16)
• "Day yields to dusk. The artful lie takes awful work./ We strive words from the loath core of our will:/ You will be loved again. Everything'll be all right" (p.20)
• "I needed to choose a capital and a flag for the breakaway republic of myself" (p.50)

rather than

• "There are no jackdaws, minimal chess/ is apparent" (p.87)
• "An egg when cooked/ is all tails (p.101)

I prefer the earlier Lumsden.

Other reviews

• Andy Jackson (many of his poems contain elaborate references to the esoteric and the arcane.)
• Laurie Donaldson (The 51 verses appear at first read to be flimsy, seemingly insubstantial morsels, but singly, and in sum, are worth a thorough chew, offering more on each read. ... Someone who obviously revels in uncommon words can easily make such expressions the whole point, and that could shut the reader out, bore them with needing to constantly refer to a dictionary. However, Lumsden never does that, not relying on the sesquipedalian but using arcane words to help shed new light on ourselves and our motives ... Many of the poems also require many reads, providing further insight into its meaning, and more pleasure as to its wordplay and inventiveness, and show them to be more ludic than febrile. ... In reading through this excellent collection, I kept coming back to ‘Self, Rising’, as it seems central to what Lumsden is trying to do.)
• David Green (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. ... Women in Paintings is here, officially the best new poem I saw in 2013)
• Michael Hulse ('The Bells of Hope’, left me sad and disillusioned. Fifty-two three-and-a-half-line poems titled ‘The Autist’, ‘The Brunt’, ‘The Canon’, and so on to ‘The Xerox’, ‘The Yore’ and ‘The Zombie’, then back through ‘The Yen’ and ‘The Ximenean’ all the way to ‘The Bore’ and ‘The Approximation’ – heavens, can that be the time?)

"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"