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

This second collection has created something of a stir: Poetry Book Society Choice, shortlisted for the T S Eliot Award, the poet invited to read at the Poetry International in October. Fortunately the stir is justified. Lumsden’s first book, Yeah Yeah Yeah, showed an original poetic mind at work. The Book of Love confirms that he is doing something quite new and distinctive, and it is a measure of these qualities that he has been recognised so widely so soon.

A second collection always gives a clearer insight into the poet’s interests, methods and strengths. The Book of Love is shorter and more focussed than Yeah Yeah Yeah, a brilliant and finally dizzying display of skill in which the variety of voices, forms, images seemed well-nigh inexhaustible. There are two sequences - poems on love and sex and poems taking the names of subjects studied at school - followed by a looser set titled Hopscotch. Several of the latter deal rather mordantly with the experience of being Scottish and I take the title to refer playfully both to the wish to leave Scotland and to hopping about from topic to topic.

The love/sex sequence shows Lumsden’s skills at full stretch. Each poem presents a different view of the subject. As or perhaps more important, each poem is through-composed so that its viewpoint is expressed in particularly apt form, language or imagery or any combination of these. This is very different from the majority of poets who write in a particular personal style and sometimes attempt a poem or sequence in a different voice, usually with some title, typographical device or other throat-clearing to make clear to the reader that this isn’t the poet’s ‘real’ voice.

With Lumsden there is no real voice or, more accurately, no voice is more real than other. Strikingly, he does not adopt particular voices nor is he a mimic. What he does - and its originality dawns only gradually - is to write each poem in his own voice but as if it was unconnected with anything he has written or even thought before. There is no preparation, no throat-clearing; the poem tells itself in its particular way, stops and is followed by something entirely different. This creates abundance and variety and, in his best work, an extraordinary freshness. In poem after poem, one is aware that no-one, not even Lumsden himself, has written anything like this before.

The book starts with Incident in a Filing Cupboard in which the meaninglessness of the contact is rendered in office clichés and pointless statistics. The next poem, Because, remakes the traditional love lyric, using simple images and rhythm to express an aching dependence: Because

...you write yes a thousand times
on the dry stone wall of me

embroider a silver lining
in the black cloud of me...

The third poem describes a sexual encounter with a much older woman where the feeling is expressed by dragging rhythms and weak line endings. The fourth, Love’s Young Dream, is an assonantal sonnet on a hopeless adolescent passion. The fifth, Piquant, is a physical celebration of the fluids engendered by sexual heat: not just “sweat is consommé” but also

..other fluids I shan’t mention
are sulphur, globster, stinkhorn, horse or Brie.

And so on. The twenty-two poems in the sequence also include a version of the Bonnie-and-Clyde I Natural Born Killers romance with its inevitable sickening violence (Communion); Carlisle, Lumsden’s take on the aubade, which also ends with implied violence:

Her head on my shoulder. The past,
a rose-red carcase hanging on a hook.

Voyeur in which emotional frozenness is enacted by the repeated response “No. Just watching.” to all experience, natural as well as sexual, and is summed up by the last line, “The rutting motion of the rocking chair”; Troilism written in triplets with three examples; and the brilliant epithalamion, In the Wedding Museum, with which the sequence ends, in which the physical relics of the wedding are retained:

This bucket’s where I-can’t-remember-who was sick.
The marquee poles are here and chapagne flutes
are poking from each pocket of the bridegroom’s suit...

to be given sense by the last four lines:

And this is why we’ve come
to visit this museum, ten years on,
with these to children, blushing ear to ear,
who’re laughing, knowing this is why they’re here.

There is something warmly normative about this and the placing of it at the end of the sequence. It bears the implication that marriage and children are, after all, the ultimate purpose of love and sex. This fits with Lumsden’s frequent rejections, sometimes implicit, sometimes overt, of loveless sex: as in Lithium where he discovers the drug in his “one-night friend’s” bedside drawer and

              Now, I cannot sleep
in this ugly pietà, my suffersome jowl at rest
on the miscued curling stone of her breast.

And in Against Naturism where he comes clean about “my double load I of Calvinist and voyeuristic tendencies” and, in an anti-nudist tour-de-force, expresses powerful disgust at the unadorned flesh. The one false note appears in Marmalade which is placed about central in the sequence and provides the book’s title. (The marmalade is in a jar by the bed.) There is a lively description of uninvolved sex:

this dog-watch dalliance, this matinee
performance of our beastly cabaret

where disgust is well expressed by the animal imagery and, later, by the clichéd outcomes in The Book of Love. But this isn’t enough and the poem ends:

By all of which I mean, beware;
best know just who and where you are and why,
before you dip your fingers in the jar.

It is impossible to put a postmodern spin on this. Here we hear the true voice of John Calvin.

In the Subjects sequence, Lumsden sets himself the more difficult task of mocking the subjects that he, and all of us, learned at school but without appearing anti-intellectual. For a poet whose learning is visibly considerable, however lightly carried, this would be hypocritical. The first poem, History, comes close to sneering at knowledge, a situation from which Lumsden extricates himself by resorting to an uncharacteristic dirty joke. The others relate less obviously to their subject and, given this obliqueness, their pleasures are rather incidental.

Classics seems to have a member of the House of Atreus bathing his young children; Geography is a prose rant by a half-crazed Scottish supermarket stacker; Economics is, no doubt rightly, a shaggy dog story; German consists of sentences apparently translated from a Business German manual and confirms the cliché that Germans are literal-minded and dull; Games consists of the names (apparently) of 30 children’s games, including the two used as sequence titles in this book; and Biology, also in prose, describes an ambiguous experiment where the narrator sees his sperm through a microscope “going round and round in decreasing circles, looking strangely familiar”. This is one of the few convincing jokes in the sequence and there is, indeed, a feeling of experiment, rather than achievement, about the set.

The rest of the poems in the book are more varied, ranging from the overtly occasional such as Makeover (as we might almost begin to expect, this commissioned poem is also the most clearly personal and most tender in the book) to the two strongly patterned poems at the book’s end. Lullaby especially, with its refrain line at the end of each verse,

between the drowsy lovers and the living dead
A to L, my love, and M to Z...

between the sleeping beauty and the slugabed
A to L, my love, and M to Z

reminds me of the refrain songs of Auden, such as O tell me the truth about love, about whom more in a moment.

My favourite is Pagan which starts with a girl stripping off in the narrator’s car “to show me the Celtic serpent tattoo / which twists all over the pale force of her body”. The poet is unimpressed:

Yet what has she done but swap one implausible God
for a full menagerie of implausible ones?

and tells her about Hugh MacDiarmid, the leading poet of renascent Scots nationalism. Behind this is his memory that MacDiarmid changed from writing in Scots to writing in English following a head injury caused by falling down the stairs of a London bus. The poem ends:

Shelley sighs, says nothing. For the rest of the journey,
there is only the slow pall of the engine,
the occasional cawing of goddesses, the lowing of gods.

Several complex emotions are resonantly expressed: sexual opportunity lost by his refusal to accept pagan myth; the reduction of gods under this myth to crows and cattle; the inexplicable pointlessness of events; realisation that cultural history is as subject to accident as everything else. There are the incidental pleasures of the girl having the name of an English radical poet and the several meanings of “pall”. For my money, Lumsden has not achieved anything of quite this depth elsewhere.

There is no reason, of course, to assume that any of the poems is based on personal experience. As I suggested earlier, each poem is written as a serious game. This may help to explain Lumsden’s close interest in pop music; no-one would assume that a pop lyric was personal. I am reminded of Auden and his lifelong interest in writing songs and libretti, and it seems that, at a deeper level, Lumsden is one of the very few poets whom one can plausibly compare with Auden. For other poets about whom this is said, such as Thom Gunn and Peter Porter, the comparison is true only at the level of skill with verse forms and references. Lumsden has a temperamental affinity with Auden in that he understands instinctively that writing a poem is, first and foremost, a performance, initially for the self and then for others. To be clear, not written necessarily for performance, but as a performance - the mind at its fullest stretch, doing what it knows it does best.

Lumsden’s skills with form, imagery, the singable quantities of words and lines, are very reminiscent of Auden, though Lumsden is an ironist in a way that Auden never was. Lumsden’s methods are also clearer - there is no need nowadays to be difficult in order to appear profound - and it is worth noting that several of his poems are based on lists. Perhaps this is related to his day job as a setter of quizzes. Give me the names of eight ventriloquists or their dummies? (Bellyfull). Three popular posters sold by a chain of art shops? (Athena). Ten imaginary or made-up creatures? (Cryptozoology). Seven scientific terms? (The Beginning of the End). This is not to denigrate the skill with which the lists are used (and to magical effect in For the Birds), but to emphasise that the poems are composed in a very thoroughgoing way. Another technique, seen in Classics, Census and East of Eden, is the transformation of an apparently modern event by a title giving historical resonance.

Finishing the book, I am reminded of the temperament described in Hugh Kenner’s The Stoic Comedians. It begins: “The Stoic is one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed”. In his earlier years, Lumsden made his living from playing quiz machines; a more Stoical occupation is impossible to imagine. At one level, his work speaks to a sense of life which, though not new, has become more common with the loss of religious and political faith: a sense that nothing very much is to be expected from life, but at least one can be entertaining about it.

There is also a slightly darker side. In Pagan, turning from religions old and new, he says: “What I believe in are those millions of moments I just before the moments when things go wrong.” He knows we are subject to contingency at any moment - the fall on the bus that turns the Scots poet into an English one - but knows that we should not be fazed by this. We must perform, minute by minute, day by day, to ourselves and others. And if we can turn some of these performances into poetry - serious but playful, witty but tough-minded - as least we show that things haven’t gone terminally wrong yet.