Mischief Night: New and Selected Poems [Paperback]

Roddy Lumsden (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1852246723 | ISBN-13: 978-1852246723 | Publication Date: February 6, 2005

Throughout Mischief Night the rhymes, the larks, the brutal punch-lines tug Lumsden's poems off the page and into the living context they describe."" - Verse

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Roddy Lumsden 's first book Yeah Yeah Yeah (1997) was shortlisted for Forward and Saltire prizes. His second collection The Book of Love (2000), a Poetry Book Society Choice, was short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize. He is a freelance writer, specialising in quizzes and word puzzles, and has held several residencies, including ones with the City of Aberdeen, St Andrews Bay Hotel, and in 1999 as "poet-in-residence" to the music industry when co-wrote The Message,a book on poetry and pop music published by the Poetry Society. Born in St Andrews in 1966, he lived in Edinburgh then London before moving to Bristol.

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd (February 6, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1852246723
• ISBN-13: 978-1852246723
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,059,137 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars extremely uneven, December 10, 2004

By 

[e-mail] "[e-mail]" (Beaumont, tx USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Mischief Night: New and Selected Poems (Paperback)

This collection of poems is extremely uneven. Lumsden's early work, _Yeah Yeah Yeah_ and _The Book of Love_ contains an overall work that isn't too bad (and here is where you'll find the great poem "Always"). But it isn't enough to carry the book. The new poems are weak and trite. And the previously unpublished sonnet sequence, Cavoli Riscaldati and his collection _Roddy Lumsden is Dead_ is just plain bad. There's nothing real great here. And I had such high hopes for this collection.

Always

After the full-day's westward drive you find
the house familiar from a photograph,
its brass-hung door thrown wide.

A meeting party welcomes you: up front,
the matriarch, corn hair tied in a bunch,
the husband of few words

and, in behind two sniffly, smutty boys
you'll take a good few days to tell apart,
a gran'ma, blunt and blouse.

It's then that you sense her, in and down the hall,
so vague, at first you take her for a shadow
or portrait on the wall,

the daughter who, that night, will steal in slow
to visit you with kisses coarse and sweet,
to gift you with her heat,

and who through the remainder of the week
won't speak again, although you send her notes,
whose name you never know.

And always this will whittle at your wits-
the way she gave her nightdress to the floor,
one finger to her lips

to call aboard the silence of the land
to forge the night-time colours in her hair-
until you grow unsure

of what was real and what was in the wind,
of all that being meant before and since
that single word she said.