Customer Reviews

Mischief Night: New and Selected Poems

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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 And the previously unpublished sonnet sequence, Cavoli Riscaldati and his collection _Roddy Lumsden is Dead_ is just plain bad.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.