Terrific Melancholy
Published on 31. May 2011
Book
Paperback/Softback
72 pages
978-1-85224-908-3 (ISBN)
Description
Roddy Lumsden's Terrific Melancholy is a book of changes, physical and emotional. It begins with a diverse sequence on that most dubious and folkloric of changes, rebirth into a new life, exploring our history's advances - changeless, changeful. Meanwhile, in the lengthy title-poem, an actor's reluctant crush on a younger colleague leads him to look back on life from middle age, while the poet himself does the same during travels in the USA. This is Lumsden's sixth collection and it also contains a miscellany of new poems which display the writer's acclaimed inventiveness with form and structure and his breadth of approaches: satire, listing, praise poems and a new form, the 'ripple poem', which develops the use of 'fuzzy' rhyme.
Reviews / Votes
There is a level of talent that will ransom any project in any school. On the one hand, it will be interesting to see where Lumsden goes next; on the other, he's so good that it hardly matters. -- D.H. Tracy * Poetry * Although the verse is hopping with linguistic antics, the foci of the language are music and rhetoric and, whip-smart as these poems are, they tend to resist chin-stroking analysis - the rhymes, the larks, the brutal punch-lines tug Lumsden's poems off the page and into the living context they describe. -- Matthew Smith * Verse * One of the best poets writing in English on the planet today. -- Don Share * Squandermania *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 138 mm
Thickness: 4 mm
Weight
233 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-85224-908-3 (9781852249083)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
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Person
Roddy Lumsden (1966-2020) was born in St Andrews, and lived in Edinburgh for many years before moving to London in 1998. His first book Yeah Yeah Yeah (1997) was shortlisted for Forward and Saltire prizes. His second collection The Book of Love (2000), a Poetry Book Society Choice, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Mischief Night: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2004) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His later collections were Third Wish Wasted (2009), Terrific Melancholy (2011), Not All Honey (2014), which was shortlisted for the Saltire Society's Scottish Poetry Book of the Year Award, and So Glad I'm Me (2017), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2017 and the Saltire Society Scottish Poetry Book of the Year Award 2018. His anthology Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2010. He was a freelance writer and editor, also specialising in quizzes and word puzzles, and represented Scotland twice on BBC Radio 4's Round Britain Quiz. He also held several residencies, including ones with the City of Aberdeen, St Andrews Bay Hotel, and as "poet-in-residence" to the music industry when he co-wrote The Message, a book on poetry and pop music (Poetry Society, 1999). His other books include Vitamin Q: a temple of trivia, lists and curious words (Chambers Harrap, 2004).