Woodward on Roddy Lumsden

Roddy Lumsden is Trapped by Time and Space

 

Roddy Lumsden made a big entrance onto the British poetry scene when he won The Eric Gregory Award in 1991 at the age of twenty five, since then Lumsden has never succeeded in replicating the major success he once had in prize terms. While his general success as a poet is incontestable, to look at Lumsden’s career by the measure of literature awards is to see him running a very strange race through time - backwards from his peak of success to obscurity. Lumsden is indeed in an unusual position; while he has been running backwards his fellow Scottish contemporaries have outstripped him over and over again, most notably Don Paterson, Robin Robertson and Sean O Brien, the headliners of the last powerful generation of poets all of whom were writing and winning big prizes in the 90s and all of whom continue to do so, unlike Lumsden, for whom the natural progression of time seems to have been all wrong. So far Roddy Lumsden has had a prolific and highly active career, between his Eric Gregory award and the publication of his first collection Yeah Yeah Yeah he worked as a quizmaster writing two three-hour quizzes each week and brought out two chap books Elsewhere Perhaps Later and new poets series 1, the latter shared with Kate Lowenstein. He has had numerous residencies including one with the City of Aberdeen and most interestingly one to the St Andrews Bay Hotel, a hotel golf resort and as ‘writer in residence’ to the music industry from which came The Message, a book on poetry and pop music. Since then we’ve seen one collection after another The Book of Love, Roddy Lumsden is Dead, an exploration of persona as inspired by Lumsden’s problems with DPD (depersonalisation disorder) The Bubble bride, Mischief Nights: New and Selected Poems, the pocket book Super Try Again and Third Wish Wasted (poems from which were awarded the Bess Hoskin Prize by the Poetry Foundation) with his eighth poetry collection Terrific Melancholy due out in 2011. Besides this he has held many high profile editing jobs on award winning projects, in particular with Salt and Tall Lighthouse while keeping up his work as a freelance puzzle, quiz and popular reference writer. Neither is this an exhaustive compilation of Lumsden’s work. So while Lumsden carries an impressive nebula of works and achievements under his belt it is still the big prizes like the TS Eliot and the Forward Prizes that elude him. Given his professional success and recognised talent (many of his works have been shortlisted for big prizes and/or made poetry book society choices) how is it Lumsden is running his backwards race while the big successes of his generation claim one prize after another? Sean O Brien’s collections Ghost Train, Downriver and The Drowned Book have all won the Forward Prize for best poetry collection of the year, making him the only poet to have won this award more than once and Don Paterson’s collection Landing Light won both the TS Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award (now the Costa Poetry Award) followed by Rain which won the Forward Prize for best Collection. This strange effect could have less to do with conspiracies in the prize giving department and more with Lumsden’s style. Roddy Lumsden’s work has a strange relationship with time and context and most peculiarly with the work of other poets, which keeps him fixed in an obscure position. If we look closely at Don Paterson’s and Robin Robertson’s 90s work for example, Lumsden’s temporal difficulty becomes a little clearer. From Don Paterson’s A Private Bottling (God’s Gift to Women, 1997): Back in the same room that an hour ago we had led, lamp by lamp into the darkness I sit down and turn the radio on low as the last girl on the planet still awake reads a dedication to the ships and puts on a recording of the ocean. I carefully arrange a chain of nips in a big fairy ring; in each square glass the tincture of a failed geography, its dwindles burns and woodlands, whin fires, heather, the sklent of its wind and its salty rain, the love worn habits of its working folk, the waveform of their speech , and by extension how they sing, make love, or take a joke. And Roddy Lumsden’s Swanning (Yeah Yeah Yeah, 1997): Odd, the things you think on, drinking alone: the difference between a void and the void, the spawn site of the conference fish, the lyrics to green onions. And on the way home, the moon leans over the sill of the night and says, in my own voice, ‘Hey, Roddy, live slow, die young.’ Even back home, this Venetian blind becomes a screen which promises, coming soon, Liberty with a Mermaid’s Tail And Babel, staring Buster Keaton. Paterson and Lumsden both share a theme, a distinctive tightness of form and a mythical quality that they bring to the world through metaphor, the biggest difference though is probably contained in the latter. Paterson’s lone drinker is in a heavily dark, mystic world, tied reverently if not religiously to the ancient and by dint of that to the undercurrent of the superstitious which is bigger than the character of the lone drinker (although by his confident narration he claims authority in relation to it). It is a style still reeling from Eliot and trapped by Hughes where the known human world is not thickened and revealed by metaphor but overtaken by a different dark, holy one. This same world fills the pages of Robertson’s A Painted Field, also released in 1997 ‘Faulted silence, dislocation,/heat in the hissing trees;/ June tightens to a drum head/that the rain begins to beat:/pavane, charade, sheherazade.’ (Storm) The metaphors which Lumsden uses however are absurd, not grand or dark, they form small private thoughts particular only to the lone drinker and leave the grand mythology of the world out of the poem to form a personal mythology, images with great meaning and promise to the world of the speaker alone, which well reflects lonely, drunken contemplations. The mundane is thickened by the magical and the reader comes to an understanding of the speaker through the sad comedy of his thoughts and motifs. This is different to the typical work of Lumsden’s generation for which Paterson and Robertson were two of the key voices. Similarities between Lumsden’s work and the work of his Scottish contemporaries definitely exist: points indirectly inferred by circling around them, great concepts contained by tight forms and occasionally near impenetrable spiels of strangeness that infer feeling or atmosphere but nothing that can be contained in a single sentence. Oddly though, many and possibly more similarities may be noted between Yeah Yeah Yeah and The Book of Love and the poetry being written by today’s generation, making Lumsden’s work curiously atemporal. The personal mythologies and metaphors which invade the speaker’s world, just like the moon in Lumsden’s Swanning are reminiscent of the animal metaphors in Jack Underwood’s poetry which become so real they materialise into characters. Lumsden’s propensity for creating his own forms is a fashion quickly catching on in the Norwich spoken word scene, headed by the poet Russell J Turner, whose poetry is almost identical to Lumsden’s Love-lies-bleeding in The Book of Love. Lumsden’s concept of a life and love recorded has been borrowed by Caroline bird as has his sense of humour for typically solemn subjects, which can just as easily be found in the poetry of Joe Dunthorne (Aisle 16) and Heather Phillipson (Faber New Poets) though admittedly this humour fills Lumsden’s poetry in tamer degrees. It is easy to see Lumsden as the austere older brother of today’s poetic generation, with his links to the new and the old, his accessibility and his obscurity which fill his books in varying ratios. Owing both to his own generation and being owed by the current generation but fitting none too comfortably with either it would seem that there is no place for Roddy Lumsden among the ivy league of his own time and that he is condemned to a privileged yet removed position today. It is perhaps no wonder then that it has been difficult for Lumsden to secure the kind of recognition that his work deserves over the course of such a long and impressive career, when because of his style, the flow of time which seems to easily carry the rest of the writing elite has refused to carry him. Each time a prize is involved, Lumsden is almost but not quite what the judge most wants to see. Poet George Szirtes was asked his thoughts on Lumsden’s work and where it may be headed: ‘Roddy Lumsden is an important figure in his generation. A highly gifted poet, he ranges widely, running on a sprightly imagination, crisp diction and a sure sense of form. I think he is of roughly the same cast of mind as Luke Kennard. Behind them both stands Paul Muldoon, or so it seems to me. I can't tell where Roddy is going at any one time because he covers a lot of ground in all directions. I expect his ground to widen still further, but also to deepen as time goes by. ’ In this summing up Szirtes touches on another complicating factor about Lumsden’s work; while his covering a lot of ground is testament to Lumsden’s talent, thoroughness and mystery, it is also what keeps Lumsden disadvantaged (metaphorically speaking) with space as well as time. In an interview with The Poetry Kit Lumsden said that ‘Getting an Eric Gregory award...made a big difference, though I think that I won one too young and I couldn’t back it up’. Yeah Yeah Yeah was the first full collection of Roddy Lumsden’s poetry and in that collection it is possible to see the effort that went into backing up that award. Yeah Yeah Yeah is a long first collection, it is exhaustive on the themes of love, relationships, drinking and the world in relation to the self. With this book Lumsden covers and impressive amount of ground, as Szirtes says, in all directions. Lumsden has, so to speak, a finger in a great many possible pies of subject, spanning a great breadth. Interestingly though, over time Lumsden’s subjects haven’t moved onwards and upwards as such, they have in fact deepened, followed the same veins and explored them slowly, incrementally. Widening and deepening, not sweeping away to new territories. This is seen easiest in Mischief Nights: New and Selected Poems, especially with the commentary of Matthew Smith, who reviewed the book for Verse in 2005. Describing the sections of the anthology Smith says ‘If Yeah Yeah Yeah is the nocturnal chronicle of one man’s perfect sins, then the next two books are the hungover morning after.’ He notes the similarity of theme and feeling between sections which are repeatedly expressed with varying degrees of eloquence. ‘The restlessness that haunts this sequence [Cavoli riscaldati] is no more defined than that which spurred the villainy of the preceding section [Yeah Yeah Yeah], but this time it seems to have less potential. Read one poem, and you’ll know where the rest are going to end up.’ And again this theme with variations crops up in the section representative of Roddy Lumsden is Dead ‘The old questions and concerns return, but with a somewhat more sublime perspective. Lost love is still lost, but retrieval is no longer the goal...Ultimately, his sentence hasn’t changed, it’s just been clarified.’ This last comment is a perfect explanation of that widening and deepening effect we may expect to see from Lumsden. He covered so much space so quickly that now he paws at and tinkers with the same subjects, with little else left to explore so it would seem, and though a lot of decent poetry has come out of that tinkering it would seem that Roddy Lumsden has fixed himself to the furtive activity and readers may never be able to guess just where it may go next (if anywhere in particular) with its line of progression not so much a line but a circle, growing like a puddle. Third Wish Wasted is probably the collection which is most subversive of this circle model, moving into the territory of dreams and dreams unrealised, often with dark folk lore influences and dense instances of prophetic symbolism and shadowy emotion not expressly tied to any one person, but floating, deep and frightening. But these are inevitably overtaken by the inextinguishable Lumsden with his self awareness, dark humour and his magical mundane. This collection is also the one, as previously mentioned, which won the Bess Hoskin Prize, which when we consider Third Wish, the most thematically progressive collection in the context of Lumsden’s previously unsuccessful circle model, doesn’t seem so surprising. Committing to this circular exploration of subject Roddy Lumsden has succeeded in largely not following the trends of his more successful contemporaries, perhaps avoiding prizes in this way but also avoiding the alarming propensity, particularly among the Scottish part of his generation, for poetry which is often impressive but aloof and elite, intelligent but on occasion difficult to empathise with, difficult to be moved by, not forgetting an inexplicable collective fascination with Ovid and Dante which takes possession of the poetic sensibility. So Lumsden can be proud of being a stand alone, peculiar and oftentimes peculiarly good act, but it won’t win him any big prizes. So if Lumsden shared something, but not much, in common with his generation at the beginning of its time, because of his static potion in time and space, it would appear that he shares very little with it now, that Lumsden fits into today’s prize winning scene with small similarities within some big contrasts. But that of course all depends on where he goes after Third Wish Wasted. It may be right to imagine then, that when this present generation is finally handed over to the next it will be Lumsden standing on top, bridging the gap between the two, if only in a mysterious grand scheme of things and not accompanied by any viable success. But as Szirtes says it is hard to see where Lumsden is going, the fact that his progression has been so totally unlike that of his contemporaries may be a sign that he has completely taken himself, so to speak, out of the pool of time, that he is passing up a chance to be more greatly recognised, that he will pass with the old generation, but that may be a long time yet. But likewise, perhaps Lumsden will prove to have remarkable staying power in his consistency and the obstinate difficulty he causes when critics try to place him. Only time will tell how the prize givers decide to look at Lumsden’s ever spreading, ever deepening work, whether he will at any point, ever fit the bill or whether he will remain with his obscurity.       Catherine Woodward Catherine Woodward, originally from Lancashire, currently studies Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her debut poetry collection Delusions of Grandeur is available from Ettrick Forest Press (http://www.efpress.com)