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Clare Pollard reviews Roddy Lumsden is Dead by Roddy Lumsden (Wrecking Ball Press £7.95) and Lithium by Emma-Jane Arkady (Arc Publications £6.95)

"A poet confessing to mental illness is like a weight-lifter admitting to muscles", Roddy Lumsden observes in the notes to Roddy Lumsden is Dead.  I would argue that it is more like a wrestler admitting to cheating - something standard until recently, when WWF wrestlers suddenly came over all sensitive and started referring to themselves as 'athletes.'  Similarly, since poetry has become more professionalised in recent years - with the installation of creative writing in universities, and the whole residency-Arvon-workshop junket - the concept of the poet as a suffering soul is out of fashion.  And as a result, confessionalism is deemed excessive, unseemly and - due in part to the current rash of TV chat-shows - vulgar.  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.  It is refreshing, therefore, to come across two new volumes - Lumsden's and Emma-Jane Arkady's debut Lithium  - that deal unashamedly with the mental illness of their writers.

Both are, however, a distinctly twenty-first century version of confessionalism - one that takes in modern poetry's taste for intelligence and knowingness, and never lets out anything as raw as a cry of pain.  The poets use different techniques to create a distance between themselves as writers and as sufferers, with Arkady perceiving her work as 'faction' whilst Lumsden often refers to himself in the third person.  This is not the white-hot anguish of Sexton or Lowell, but something more careful and measured.  In Lumsden's collection this coolness works perfectly as the mental illness he suffered from involved 'depersonalisation,' a sickness that he describes as: "'filmic', i.e. the sufferer feels himself to be a character in the film of his own life".  Lumsden manages to harness a real sense of this disassociation from reality and exploit all of its ironies and bathos.  The condition becomes the perfect medium through which to reinvent confessionalism for these ironic, television-driven, apathetic times. 

Unfortunately, in Arkady's Lithium the distance seems less relevant to the material, and more like a failure to engage.  This is a shame, because in many ways, it is a strong debut collection.  Like Lumsden, Arkady is not afraid to use the banal and 'unpoetic', with references to Carlsberg, Blair, ISAs, and Hygena grounding her work in a very English reality.  She is capable of unsparing passages such as that in the finest poem, Kissing at Wash Brisk:

and then he kissed me, lost
balance, fell two foot to the six inch
slurry, snapped his back on a brickbat;
but it was the salmonella that killed him,
after two weeks in traction and deep shit,
salmonella.

This is a devastatingly unsentimental view of the dangers of love:  funny, horrible and unflinching.  The excellent Alison's Example, about first experiments with masturbation, expertly uses slangy references to girl who "pulled / a train" and "deep water", and then pulls them together in a wonderful final image:

At ten in the green-dark of my text
scattered bed, I reflect on wagons pulsing
the tender place, test the depth of the lake.

Arkady obviously has material in abundance, and there are few poems that seem anything but intensely felt - from the portrayal of damaging family relationships in Trashing the Deli to the clinical depression of Sad.  Where the work falters is when telling the story becomes prioritised over the skill with which it is told.  An example of this comes in Return to Sandy, a poem about coming to terms with love for a woman, which is the most emotionally interesting poem in the collection, but repeatedly falls into slack prose:

after fifteen years of marriage to hell and a man, who
insisted the only lust to count was sex on a Saturday night
after the match before putting up in the bathroom

The line break after "who" is here totally arbitrary, whilst the cliched equation of marriage with hell reeks of a first-draft laziness.  Similarly Aftertaste, about attempting suicide, should be harrowing, but can only compare the experience to "forbidden fruit, the stealing from his orchard".  If good confessionalism exposes emotions and speaks the unspeakable, here Arkady only covers the event up with the second-hand images of others.  Its 'meaning' is a half-truth so overused it is meaningless.  Reflection is, in fact, Arkady's weakness, encouraging as it does bland generalisations such as this - she is much better when she articulates the feeling of a moment, as in the thrillingly unexpected 'I am a here thing' in Waiting You Home (Anna Cooks Pizza) or 'The dance turns to rancid milk' in Four Weeks of Mania.  Overall, Lithium is a frustrating mixture of the risky and the hackneyed, the brutal and the sentimental.  If she can shake off the by-numbers, workshopped feel that taints some of her language, Arkady has the potential to be a brave and interesting poet. Unfortunately, Lithium left me feeling neglected as a reader.  Too often, the poems fail to put in that extra effort required to convey exactly how it was.

If Lumsden has a weakness it is the opposite.  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.  Pokemon is gimmicky, and says nothing new of the phenomenon.  The Moths, in which moths eat all the narrator's textiles, does not seem to have any wider resonance, whilst The Six simply says: wouldn't it be funny if there were six of me? and leaves it at that.  These are half-ideas, the work of moments, and beg the question: so what?  If anything, this is probably the fault of an indulgent editor, though there are still enough good lines to make this section worth trawling through - from a description of phlegm as "butterscotchy" to the image "A blue butterfly / wheezes to a fullstop on a drain lid".

Lumsden fans may find me critical, but 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.  In this sequence Lumsden's distance, irony and cinematic textures find their perfect subject in the exploration of his mental illness, and everything clicks.  This is visible in My Pain in the lines  "It's like what I told that lassie from the local paper: / I do not suffer for my art, I just suffer".  Here his humour and comfort with dialect acquire a new sense of depth behind them, and a real, pained voice emerges.  Even the funniest poems work on more than one level, as in My Sex Life  where he talks of when

You find you were wrong
in thinking your next sighting

of a naked teenager would be
an embarrassing confrontation
with a grown up daughter

With effortless wit, Lumsden evokes fear of aging, and the narrowing of dreams that it brings with it. Not that all of the poems keep such an ironic distance from the pain they articulate - it is the poet's juxtaposing of comedy and tragedy that makes the sequence such an exhilarating read.  The harrowing My Water  imagines a polluted inner landscape:

The ox-bow lake where every creature
is the final generation of its species.
The riverbottom where the proving's done.
The dish slops where the mince-grease sails,
blown by the whore's blench of my breath.

This is a visceral self-loathing as powerful as any in Lowell or Plath, but also laced with the bathos and humour of a Larkin.  My Realm of the Senses  is even more powerful - a list of troubling sensations beginning with "The liquoricy stink of badger dirt" and concluding

that you need to be touched just there just so

the spitting sound of burning pigeon-wings

I know I know I shouldn't know such things

The flatness of this last unpunctuated line makes it almost unbearable.  This is sheer, numb horror of a type few other poets could convey.  If under the influence of Jerry Springer and the Big Brother diary room, confessionalism has become associated with the self-promoting and fame-hungry, Lumsden exploits this, highlighting the nature of all confession as performance, and playing his self-dramatisation for laughs. 

At the same time, both he and Arkady are the opposite of such primetime hyperbole:  distant, unscandalous and calm.  Both prove, even within their own collections, that confronting psychological and emotional truths produces much more necessary literature than the anecdotal subject matter that too many modern poets toy with.  But Lumsden in particular puts new blood into the genre, asking in My Solitude:  "Does it read like a draft for a suicide note?  No, I've a coldness: a cool, not a cruel-streak."  For too long, confessionalism has been written off as something for hysterical harpies.  Roddy Lumsden is Dead shows that it can be cool, too.