Terrific Melancholy

by Roddy Lumsden

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.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published November 29, 2011

About the author

Roddy Lumsden was a Scottish poet. He published seven collections of poetry, a number of chapbooks and a collection of trivia, as well as editing a generational anthology of British and Irish poets of the 1990s and 2000s, Identity Parade, among other anthologies.

Reviews

[El · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this volume of poetry. My first of Roddy Lumsden's work, and I will read more. While some of the verse did not resonate with me as much as other sections, I would still very much recommend this text.