#roddy lumsden

The masters laboured – all the hours of the clock – to clone the ringlets of a marchioness or pull a cape of dark around the head of an ecstatic saint.

Portraiteers talked low and long to captive sitters, so Boleyn’s swan neck can still be kissed, Jill persist in a steel blue frock, the year my parents met.

And in Sous Bois, Corot threw down a lilac twister of a sunstreak, through which the bonneted girl is ever about to step, daydreaming of candied fruit.

Some nights I catch the smell                           of the lives of others, all that is awry, agley,                           the washers loose, the springs rust-bunged.                           Or the sheerest glee I hope and fear that friends may feel:                           their refound wallet or the cat returned after a week                           and just a little thin. And when I say I smell this, I am                           talking creosote, broth smog, thinners. The room hangs                           round the smell, would bow to its bidding or bawl                           at its funeral. I strain to enter the life of another,                           to bathe them, taunt them, treat. For people mainly think they only                           think they think that no one thinks like them. But I too                           have met against your tarriest thought, your sick ambition,                           lay late with a knife in my mind, or a pulse of appalling glory.                           We are alike as mercury and nickel are, as leopard and gazelle                           might blink in unison. Even my siblings are disarmingly other.                           And as a man walking through all hours of darkness, clearing                           to clearing, stile to well to glebe to turnpike, I catch a gamey taint                           of other beings, softly being, grinding in foliage, cowering in boles,                           zedding to warrens. Paralleling you in bed, I give marginally less                           of myself when sleep grips its pliers. No one has ever known me.                           Is that cute? I hear a woman say, 'I died that night.' A man in the audience                           shouts out in the quiet part of the play. Some self-styled prophet screams,                           full minute, on the beach and all the poppers scatter from the sea,                           gapey-eyed and clinging at Mummy. I count these sifting colours                           of my brief spectrum, halfwise touching each in turn. You should                           believe me when I say that what I am seeing now is something                           you must never see.

El hombre que pude haber sido trabaja para una institución vital: es una institución vital. Sin él, los muros se desmoronarán, en algún sitio, la pintura se desconchará. Saca partido. Es campestre y dice Vaya pesadilla y se refiere al tráfico. Es feliz viendo una película y está a punto de vivir en una. El hombre que pude haber sido tiene una camioneta Subaru del color de los tomates cherry. Tiene saldo a favor, no anda en lo oscuro. Su madre está tranquila. Hay mujeres que siguen teniendo su foto de bebé en los portafotos de sus carteras. No se le muere nadie. El hombre que pude haber sido posee pedazos de ropa no desgastada antes por tíos. No necesita medicinas. Camina de Powderhall a Newington en veinte minutos. Toca un poco el piano. Sin él, los paraísos ceden, las camas de los enfermos proliferan. El hombre que pude haber sido vive por aquí cerca. Es calladamente algebraico. Sin él, el granito no brilla. Y cuando ve una crisis, no se sumerge en ella de cabeza. Vota, porque cree en su democracia. El hombre que pude haber sido tiene sentido de la orientación. En el Cluedo, nunca le salió la Srta. Escarlata en la cocina con la daga. Conoce el estado de su tierra y siembra su semilla. Llegará a ser padre. No es un experto ni un entendido. El hombre que pude haber sido tiene un pase de temporada en Tynecastle. Vuelve a casa de noche y pone Lo Mejor de U2. Navega. Echa cosas caras en el agua del baño. No anuda su vida con secretos. El hombre que pude haber sido nació en un pedestal. Conoce la historia de Willow Pattern. Tuvo un sueño anoche que te encantaría escuchar y recuerda las letras de las canciones. Su espalda es una silla en la que han cabalgado amantes. El hombre que pude haber sido tiene dentro un soberano discurso que aún no ha pronunciado. Podría muy bien pelearse con un oso. Es un hombre de mundo. Lleva encima el precio exacto. Sin él, trauma surtido. El hombre que pude haber sido, ese, aprende de mis errores. Nunca pensó que fueras a ser tú. Y nadie dice de él tiene una pinta bastante bíblica. No necesita a Londres y camina por mitad de la calle porque es suya. El hombre que pude haber sido es rápido y limpio. No es un Cristo de pueblo ni un César de aserrín. Sin él, el agua salada te entraría en los pulmones. No oye estos xilófonos interminables. No es él ese que yace ahí.

Hard Work --Roddy Lumsden

Tricky work sometimes not to smell yourself, ferment being constant—constant as carnival sweat (a non-stock phrase I palmed from a girl from Canada, a land where I once saw this graffiti: life is great).

And I have tasted myself, especially when I spilled sinigang all down my arm in a Pinoy workers' caff in Little Manila. I drank sinigang (is soup drunk?) in Big Manila too, with all its dead skyscrapers.

Seen myself? In looking glasses or, looking down, stocky as a shift working cop, maybe a Mexican cop full of beans (frijoles, I mean, not vim), paunch full of sopa de vigilia, pulling over a sozzled bus driver.

Heard myself speak fluently in my own language, have heard myself too described as hard work (as hard to get through as Scotch broth), though once someone rather bladdered told me I was magnetic.

(From a 2005 review of three books for Poetry London, of which Roddy’s was Mischief Night.)

Roddy Lumsden’s new and selected poems marks him out as one of the most distinctive voices in British poetry. The black wit, the brilliant phrase-building and the instantly-recognisably sensibility add up to a territory he has made his own. Tenderly lusting, capable of extravagent loucheness, ‘damaged goods’ as one poem overhears, he is the King of Lachrymosity, presenting both our nagging appetites and our little uglinesses with an expert eye.

The centre of this book is the decidedly un-Whitmanic song of himself, Roddy Lumsden is Dead , an anatomy of melancholy for our time, taking us from ‘My Reptilian Existence’ to ‘My Realm of the Senses’ in thirty-odd uneasy steps. As he admits, ‘I know I know I shouldn’t know such things’, but nonetheless, how seductively he shares them:

…and tomorrow I will wake in the Japanese annexe:

my pomegranate mouth, my yak flank hair,

the skin of my back busy with mill-sweat,

feet beeling and dinging like buck-rabbits

and a dispirited girl will play a Chopin Nocturne

over and over, through in the sunlit lounge

as if someone had written a script.

Sorry: as if someone hadn’t written a script.

His lines are always crawling with precise details, pitiless with themselves regarding their constant self-regard, and twitching between phrases to graph the sensibilities that lesser poets tuck away. Some readers will perhaps locate more of those in the earlier poems – ‘Then she rolled over, laughed, began to do/To me what she so rarely did with you…’; ‘I’d been guzzling vinegar,/Tipping it on everything, falling for women who were//beautifully unsuitable’. But the more recent work, ‘The Bubble Bride’ and ‘The Drowning Man’ are full of intriguing experiments and unusual shifts in familiar perspectives.

One thing they work with more openly than in earlier poems is the list – a device that will be familiar to those who try to keep up with his spiralling encyclopaedias of trivia in print and on the Net. In ‘The Perfumes of Scotland’, ‘The Kitchens: A Guided Tour’, or ‘Overheard in a Scottish Larder’, the appetite for catalogue is almost as generous as the cataloguing of appetites itself:

Rasps straicht fae the Carse of Gowrie, cries ane.

Rain-fed brambles fae Fife hedgerows, says the ither.

The first goes, dinnae let on what a haggis is,

the ither goes, nivver let on what a haggis is.

A platefu’ o Scotch broth or Royal Game, mibbe?

Naw, a dish o cullen skink or cock-a-leekie!

Says wan, it’ll crawl roond yer hairt lik a hairy worm.

Eat up, yer at yer blind auntie’s, cries the ither.

(Here’s the tiny paragraph on So Glad I’m Me from the Eliots.)

Roddy Lumsden’s So Glad I'm Me is fully fluent in its own unique English, in which the everyday and the elegiac and the elliptical are mashed together into a rich music. Thanks to this command of phrase, his intense savouring of the minutiae of relationship, food, and song achieves a delirious democracy of the senses and the intellect. This is poetry which manages to survive in those fragmentary glimpses of our lives and our other, potential lives, and realises

Then

For the first time, I listen to a lost and secret recording of us making love near-on ten years ago. I recognize your voice, your sounds, though if I knew no better, I could be any man in any room. After, the rising sounds of rising and of dressing and once as you step up close to the deck, perhaps to pick up shoes, you sing the chorus of Sunday Morning. I call on you to hurry and we leave. It does not end then; the tape rolls on. A few late cars which sigh by might have passed us walking away triumphant, unaware we’ve left behind this mop and mow mechanism of silence to which we may never return.

Roddy Lumsden

1966-2020

Roddy Lumsden died January 10th, 2020. RIP