Terrific Melancholy, Roddy Lumsden, Bloodaxe Books ISBN: 978-1–85224-908-3 Paperback: £8.95 79pp
Terrific Melancholy, Roddy Lumsden’s sixth collection, is blessed with a cover image that strikes a chord in the imagination even before the book is opened. The photograph, by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, from their book The Ruins Of Detroit (2010), is of an ancient, dilapidated and dust-covered Kohler & Campbell upright piano so broken down and beyond repair that it will never make music again. It is a powerful study in advanced decay and its message is clear: there will be no more ragtime, no more boogie-woogie, no more easy laughter, no more fun; a watershed has been reached, one of those moments when life bares its teeth. Grim thoughts, but appropriate, given that the collection opens with a prose poem about the death of the poet’s scholarly father entitled A Localised History Of Dry Precipitation, in which, going through his late father’s papers, the surviving fragments of a bookish life, the poet meditates on Fine and finer particularities of dusts … on the wearing of khaki, which means dust, an essay on the history of the abacus, which means dust … a smut, a granule, a dying fly …his last word dust.
Lumsden’s publisher describes Terrific Melancholy as a book of 'changes, physical and emotional'; a meditation, then, on the leaving behind of youth, facing up to middle-age, to what lies beyond. The point is well made in the opening poem and continues so throughout. Early on in the book, The Shilling Hotel, for example, is a poem about old age in which the poet’s thoughts focus upon a very old woman, a centenarian: Nights we’d see her through the blind – / too gone to stir from her freeze, still / as beef – expect each morning to find her / tilted cold and open-jawed. Yet each time, / she returned, less from compelling death, / more into each next, each necessary life …
Similarly, Duology, although a poem full of images of life, also makes clear that History’s dayjob / is to usher us closer to its shady marquee. / And so we age: easier to love, harder to desire, while two lines full of pathos at the end of Hallowe’en Downpour Downer, the last poem in the collection and one which I particularly admire because it resonates so powerfully and reaches so far beyond the sum of its parts, ask the ultimate question: where can we ever be alone, oh when / can we start to sing the steady grinding blues? Seductively, Lumsden describes the thought as salty and redheaded, but it is hard not to be reminded of those lines from Andrew Marvell’s great poem To His Coy Mistress in which, as the poet says: The Grave’s a fine and private place, / But none I think do there embrace.
Despite their preoccupation with mutability and mortality, there is also tremendous vitality and energy in these poems. Known for his verbal dexterity (haecceity, scotoma, ochlophobic, glisk, spandulous, homodox, shaduf and katzenjammer among others, had me, I confess, reaching for my dictionary), his inventiveness and skills with verse forms and cadence, Lumsden demonstrates them all in this collection. In Relics (dedicated to the memory of Syd Barrett) from Six Ripple Poems, for example, the words bounce and tumble in ways more than a little reminiscent of Barrett’s own songs (Go here to know more: http://www.pink-floyd.org/barrett/sydlyrics.html): Memories rose – hints of pink: corals / carbolics, bubblegums; bop, soul, rock, / progressive, each lick of production slicker, / the suites more gunned with haze, the suits slacker. The same is true of Losses: Candida spores, heads of sweet cicely, / stars of least magnitude, flicker of souls / in graveyard photographs, brief ands and also / flipping in the small talk …
This retrospective intention is maintained throughout the collection, so that, as with Relics above, the subject is often not the poet himself, but either people and /or the many places he considers to have become iconic in his life. In and through them, he addresses the rhetorical question posed in the first line of Chinatown Funeral Motorcade: Did you think to speak of your own life, traveller?, a question heavy with significance for poets. Eidolon, for example, another of the Six Ripple Poems, is built around the word Dylan, both Bob, a wraith junking cue cards (a reference all Dylan fans will recognize) and Thomas, named for a poet named for an old / tale of the child who crawled to the sea; Kerouac, to whom Fame clung like an itchy scab rosette, has a poem to himself and there are mentions elsewhere, either direct or indirect, of others. The centrepiece of the collection, however, although placed in the second half of the book, is clearly the title poem itself. Written in stanzas of ten lines and three hundred and sixty lines long, it is a considerable achievement. Its careful exploration of the poet’s past demonstrates not only shape, structure and a strong sense of thematic unity, but also a quality of reflective depth that is sometimes moving and often beautiful. There are, I think, in the stanza quoted below alone, echoes of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in soliloquy, Eliot’s Prufrock walking the streets of London and Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot, all of them, in spite of everything, still there; it would be difficult to do better:
All is still. Though there, beneath the basin,
light barely creeps, though not dipping
into the inappropriate, not
at all like a girl skipping.
The audience pall in. I pull my pale,
damp legs into my character’s stiff trousers,
dip my head into the corridor
listen for voices in the stairwell,
check the great window for the glow
of the stage door light. Still there.
….Reviewed by Ken Head ©2011