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    Mischief Night: New & Selected Poems
    Mischief Night: New & Selected Poems
    Mischief Night: New & Selected Poems
    Ebook231 pages1 hour

    Mischief Night: New & Selected Poems

    By Roddy Lumsden

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    Roddy Lumsden is one of the liveliest and most inventive poets writing in Britain today. From the formal, frenetic debut Yeah Yeah Yeah, through the playful wit and cynicism of The Book of Love, to the 'magnificent song to himself' of Roddy Lumsden is Dead, his poetic journey has already been eventful and he remains fascinated by the intrigues of men and women and the short steps from real life to folklore to the surreal. Mischief Night brings together the best work from Roddy Lumsden's three previous collections, as well as a whole new collection, The Drowning Man. It also contains poems from his pamphlet The Bubble Bride and the previously uncollected sonnet sequence Cavoli Riscaldati. 'Sharp, bright and utterly heartbreaking, this collection by one of the most intriguing voices is alternatingly roguish, curmudgeonly, insecure, and tender. The speaker woos and teases, cajoles and repels, withdrawing before beginning again. Though the poems offer no utopian promise, no deliverance, they cut to the quick with the difficult truth of longing, need, and the 'salt of hopelessness'.' - Monique Tschofen, New Delta Review 'There are tremendous narrative poems, mysterious, lingering ones'and unforgettably realistic tales of melancholy sexual encounters'Lumsden is a brilliant vivisector and pathologist of the contemporary relationship'all we can ask for in poetry: contemplation, intelligence, stylistic beauty. Like a spreadsheet of a morality adventure, like perfectly articulated pain'a helpless celebration of Life's adventures' - Alan Warner, Scotsman
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloodaxe Books
    Release dateOct 30, 2014
    ISBN9781780372082
    Mischief Night: New & Selected Poems
    Author

    Roddy Lumsden

    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 shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Mischief Night: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2004) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His latest collections are Third Wish Wasted (2009), Terrific Melancholy (2011), Not All Honey (2014), which was shortlisted for the Saltire Society's Scottish Poetry Book of the Year Award, and So Glad I'm Me (2017). His anthology Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2010. He is a freelance writer, specialising in quizzes and word puzzles, and has represented Scotland twice on BBC Radio 4's Round Britain Quiz. He has held several residencies, including ones with the City of Aberdeen, St Andrews Bay Hotel, and as “poet-in-residence” to the music industry when he co-wrote The Message, a book on poetry and pop music (Poetry Society, 1999). His other books include Vitamin Q: a temple of trivia, lists and curious words (Chambers Harrap, 2004). Born in St Andrews, he lived in Edinburgh for many years before moving to London.

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      Book preview

      Mischief Night - Roddy Lumsden

      Mischief Night

      NEW & SELECTED POEMS

      RODDY LUMSDEN

      for Betty, Hamish, Jimmy, Carol, Eric, Rachel,

      Mhairidh, Eilidh, Jim and Katie:

      all Lumsdens and all loved.

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      This book includes poems from the following collections: Yeah Yeah Yeah (Bloodaxe Books, 1997), The Book of Love (Bloodaxe Books, 2000), Roddy Lumsden Is Dead (Wrecking Ball Press, 2001) and The Bubble Bride (St Andrews Bay, 2003).

      Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications where some of the previously unpublished poems first appeared: ACE International Fellowship brochure, Chapman, ibid, Love for Love (pocketbooks, 2000), PBS Bulletin, Poetry International brochure, Poetry (USA), Poetry Review, The Reater, The Red Wheelbarrow, Rising, Scratch, The Wolf; and to the following websites: Frank’s Casket (dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/walk/xen19), nthposition (www.nthposition.com), Scottish Art Council Poem of the Month (www.scottisharts.org.uk), Snakeskin (www.snakeskin.org.uk) and the poem (www.thepoem.co.uk).

      I would like to thank the Arts Council of England for an International Fellowship in Banff, Canada where some of the new work was written and also Arts & Business, StAnza Poetry Festival and the St Andrews Bay Golf Resort and Spa for the residency during which several poems here were written. For help with recent work, I wish to thank Julia Copus, A.B. Jackson, Kathleen Ossip, Joanna Quinn, John Stammers and Todd Swift. I would like too to express my gratitude to all those who have given advice and support during the fifteen years spanned by the work in this book.

      CONTENTS

      Title Page

      Dedication

      Acknowledgements

      THE DROWNING MAN

      The Tremendous Few

      Charcoal Sketch

      What Love Cannot Do

      Miss Hollington’s Notes

      Us

      Q

      Rain at Night

      The Knack

      The Waitresses

      Sorry

      Life Story

      Moments of Terror

      Fear of Music

      Second Prayer

      For Jesus

      Letter From an Admirer

      The Bath in Milk

      The Drowning Man

      Between Hallowe’en and Bonfire Night

      The Deaths of Imaginary Friends

      Moments of Pleasure

      Still

      Turning into Grizzly Street

      From the Valentine Studio

      Cover Versions

      On the Cusp of Virgo and Libra

      Specific Hunger

      Perfumes of Scotland

      Conspiracy Sketch

      True Believers

      Miss America

      One Acre Yard

      fromTHE BUBBLE BRIDE(2003)

      Sang o’ the Kittock’s Loddie

      A Saltire

      Hotel Showers of the World

      The Kitchens: A Guided Tour

      On the Boat-slope

      The Bubble Bride

      Spent

      Lateral Vertigo

      Overheard in a Scottish Larder

      Lumsden Hotel

      Little Fife

      Evidence of Owls

      fromRODDY LUMSDEN IS DEAD(2001)

      Roddy Lumsden Is Dead

      My Pain

      My Death

      My Funeral

      My Post-mortem

      My Reptilian Existence

      My True Love

      My Allegory

      My Early Years

      My Hormones

      My Dark Side

      My Last Supper

      My Complex

      My Water

      My National Stigma

      My Limbo

      My Face Not Fitting

      My Half-life

      My Sex Life

      My Ascent

      My Descent

      My Superstition

      My Luck

      My Reflection

      My Sickness

      My Performance

      My Realm of the Senses

      My Plea

      My Meeting with the Goddess

      My Prayer

      My Future

      My Solitude

      My Life

      My Pennyworth

      My Spring

      But Sweet

      The Consolation

      Weathergirl

      Priapus

      Higher Still

      The Shortcut

      Song

      Song

      Escher

      The Wish

      The Wager

      One Thing I Do Know

      Intramuros

      Simpatika

      The Drop of a Hat

      fromTHE BOOK OF LOVE(2000)

      Incident in a Filing Cupboard

      Because

      An Older Woman

      Love’s Young Dream

      Piquant

      Always

      Marmalade

      The Twelfth Kind

      Lithium

      Voyeur

      For the Birds

      Against Naturism

      Troilism

      Proof

      Tricks for the Barmaid

      from Subject Matter

      The Beginning of the End

      Acid

      Scarlet

      An Outlying Station

      Athena

      Bellyful

      Solo

      Pagan

      Show and Tell

      Hobbledehoy

      The Man I Could Have Been

      Lullaby

      CAVOLI RISCALDITI

      St Andrews

      Grief

      Easter

      Vena Cava

      Heatwave

      Reading the Suddenlys

      Making a Mistake

      Encraty

      What Happened Next

      Transfiguration

      Square One

      Making a Comeback

      Digitalis

      Making a Getaway

      Abacus

      Halfway Across

      Compendium

      Harm’s Way

      Making a Scene

      Elsewhere Perhaps Later

      Life Means Life

      Manila

      Ether

      What We Became

      fromYEAH YEAH YEAH(1997)

      Then

      Sunday Morning 2.13 a.m.

      St Patrick’s Day

      Manners

      Coming

      364

      Yeah Yeah Yeah

      Prayer To Be with Mercurial Women

      Trespass

      On a Promise

      Noyade

      from St James Infirmly

      After Entomology

      Cardinal

      Infighting

      Noah

      August (and Nothing After)

      Rogation

      The World’s End

      Lines to a Missionary

      Mercy

      Beach Ceilidh

      ITMA

      The Boy

      Roisin’s Wolves

      The Ultimate Curve

      Vanishing

      The Answers

      About the Author

      Copyright

      THE DROWNING MAN

      Who swims in sin shall sink in sorrow.

      PROVERB

      I’m doing all right, feeling fine, still alive, I’m doing all right, feeling fine, I’m doing all right, I’m still alive, I’m doing fine!

      MARQUIS DE SUAVE

      , Postcards

      The Tremendous Few

      So many, so many songs

               for the suicides, for the lives

      docked in middle age;

               those taken in the evening’s hiss

      or who buckle in the draught

               halfway across the ford.

      When the day tarries, I wonder

               if only you and I whisper

      of scattered ashes, shoebox coffins,

               the gemstone hearts

      of the stillborn and miscarried

               who did not reach the shore,

      whose fading voices fail to split

               the hanging dark

      when children throng the streets

               in gangs on Mischief Night.

      Charcoal Sketch

      Fire on the fields – the stubble

      sputters and the larksong stops

      in mid-note. The chapel bell

      creaks on in the evening haze.

      Turmoil in the henhouse

      while in the barton, lentils

      spill from a toppled, airtight

      flagon and tick onto the table.

      A cigar snivels in a jamjar.

      Craneflies jig on the sap.

      A rusting boneshaker merges

      with the coalshed’s copper roof.

      The charcoal burner prods

      his parched heap to make amends.

      His compass needle spins

      in mayhem; he sucks a sweet root.

      Down in the hideout, two curly-

      headed tykes practise hand jive

      or else the sinister language

      which the hand jive has become.

      What Love Cannot Do

      It could not save my friend from seeing what a window

      showed him one night, it was Christmas, can’t slow

      the wave that swallowed Noel, Nelly beneath the wheel,

      the bad seed in Ruth’s little breast, girls when they fall,

      won’t castigate the squeeze who plumps for greedy sex

      behind your back, our families picked off like tin ducks,

      the daft bear galloping from side to side to side;

      my rock thuds down again on the sick gull’s head,

      my rock, six kitties hanging from a rowan branch

      and no you will not catch it cancelling a flint, a flinch,

      the jailer’s giggling stun gun, wire in my belly;

      love lugs and struggles upstream, love is only holy,

      it does not suckle, wears no fur, will leave no prints;

      quit bolstering it, honey, here’s my evidence:

      when meat rains, when meat rains from the sky,

      accept it, love will not be hovering nearby.

      Miss Hollington’s Notes

      * a chorus of rum babas heaving preposterously behind cold glass * the trophy smears when hot fudge lifts from greaseproof paper * a squadron of traybakes awaiting rosettes * the sottish way I feel with my tongue lodged in a tub of clotted cream * the crevice in a blackcurrant boiling sharp enough to slice a cheek * brandy butter lurching down my leg at half a mile an hour * a gugglet of crème de banane to make me loll * a salvo of sweetwater grapes * the tongue chancing on cold sherbet in the belly of a raspberry blob * a bear-paw mapped with maple sap * the life rattle of coated raisins in a little tin * the lazy Susan spinning laden swooning * a currency of wild berries dipping over the sluice * Josiah’s Bay Float supped from a half pineapple * my silly dream-face slick with nectar * the syrupy crumbs of Kugelhopf, jalousie and lingue di gatto * a kaleidoscope punnet of hundreds and thousands * a dowager duchess’s wig of candy floss * the sweet shoots which the pygarg nips in Genesis *

      Us

      The usual entertainments. The brazen tune

      of sticks along a fence. The silt of hunger.

      Ablution’s waltzes; the

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