Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

If you can get past the in-your-face packaging of this book with its orgiastically-massed hands on the cover; a title that strains the seams of its irony; overwhelming blurb and the photo of its author looking like an adolescent grounded for something he didn’t do, you may as I did soon into the collection, begin to join the PBS consensus that Lumsden is actually rather brilliant.

     The irony is that, though not definitively so, it is a book of love, but it takes a while to see this. The surface dazzles with such post-modern sophistication (“hard-won... like a knife I am just about to throw...”) that it would be easy to miss the tender and lyrical undercurrents.

     Lumsden’s first collection, I thought, seemed too grimly-determined to keep all its plates spinning and its audience at arm’s length which made for a virtuoso performance but not an altogether enjoyable one. Here though, Lumsden seems to have taken the advice of the friend in ‘Marmalade’, “don’t try too hard...” and has relaxed.

     His use of personae shows genuine imagination and empathy - not to be mistaken for earnestness. There’s still enough irony to hang even the thickest necked of cynics, but now a new feeling of space makes it more accessible.

     The subject matter ranges majestically from the smells of body fluids to the boyhood of a French Mystic whose alchemical experiments apparently, foretold advances in nuclear physics.

     There are echoes and parodies of other writers as well as absorbed influences.

     To come back to ‘Marmalade’, its humorous cautioning against attempts to spice up sex with gimmicky props, is a playful and disruptive of its narrative as Tristram Shandy; ‘So, toss a coin on which will happen next...’ But there are moments too of a Dunn-like delicacy. In ‘Proof’ the narrator puzzles in his bath like Archimedes over the absorptive properties of different papers while reflecting on his marriage: “Meanwhile, our banns could barely blot a pity’s weight of blood.” And ‘Lithium’, has echoes of Lowell’s sonnet, ‘Home After Three Months Away’:

Ten years now since I placed it on my tongue
(eight white pills of a multi-coloured thirty-
                                                           one):
so much chalkdust bittering my blood
that spasms lifted me clear off the bed.

And with this new openness, there is a not altogether sincere, but still enjoyable, selfdeprecating humour (itself a kind of conceit) which adds dimension to the parody and satire: in ‘Tricks for a Barmaid’, the observation, “she knocks off/ The Scotsman brain game puzzle, starts to yawn” nicely serves to undermine the seeming boast of the final line, “It’s only a matter of time before she sleeps with me.”