Roddy Lumsden Livres

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Third Wish Wasted is a book concerned with our wishes and desires. Belonging to a world between real and imagined folklore, the poems are by turns celebratory, humorous and beguiling, and there are bittersweet contemplations of youth, beauty and fame. Roddy Lumsden was one of Britain's liveliest and most inventive poets of recent times. His fifth collection saw him extending the range of his poetry, straying into denser and more musical territory, as well as sticking with the form and wit which typifies his earlier work. In Third Wish Wasted he invents and tries out various unusual and inventive forms such as charismatics, overlays and relegated narratives. There are poems composed on a top fashion shoot, inspired by travels in the USA and, as ever, he picks apart the problems between men and women.

Roddy Lumsden's first collection, Yeah Yeah Yeah (available from Dufour), was shortlisted for both the Forward and Saltire prizes. These new poems eavesdrop on a half urban, half surreal world of ladies, men, and misfits, trying on roles and acting out fantasies. The Book of Love is a celebration of love in all its delightful perversity, whose characters include a randy actor, a vinegar addict, and couples courting in a cupboard, covered with marmalade. As voyeurs sneak into one poem, naturists streak across another, and there is the inevitable lurking presence of the poet's own (rich but square) alter ego.

Identity Parade is the first anthology of the new generation of British and Irish poets who have emerged since the mid-1990s. It is the successor to Bloodaxe's New Poetry (1993) which was the first anthology to represent the so-called New Generation PoetsA who emerged in the 1980s and 90s (the generation of Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy).

Roddy Lumsden's Terrific Melancholy is a book of changes, physical and emotional. It begins with a diverse sequence on that most dubious and folkloric of changes, rebirth into a new life, exploring our history's advances - changeless, changeful. Meanwhile, in the lengthy title-poem, an actor's reluctant crush on a younger colleague leads him to look back on life from middle age, while the poet himself does the same during travels in the USA. This is Lumsden's sixth collection and it also contains a miscellany of new poems which display the writer's acclaimed inventiveness with form and structure and his breadth of approaches: satire, listing, praise poems and a new form, the 'ripple poem', which develops the use of 'fuzzy' rhyme.

Two words, 'hope' and 'doubt', dominate 'Not All Honey', the seventh full collection by Roddy Lumsden. These awkward cousins appear repeatedly as the poet 'fathoms the ingredient for happy' despite a tendency for the 'terrific melancholy' which named his last book. Roddy Lumsden is one of the most inventive poets writing today, always keen to explore and invent forms and to challenge the musical limits of language. The collection veers between sequence and stand-alone poems, the recurring subjects including viscous liquids, popular music, folkloric beasts and relationships and friendships with younger people. This book also reproduces Lumsden's acclaimed limited edition short collection The Bells of Hope which, in 51 short and exuberant 'kernel poems', records the poet's first ever year lived alone. This is Lumsden's sixth collection and it also contains a miscellany of new poems which display the writer's acclaimed inventiveness with form and structure and his breadth of approaches: satire, listing, praise poems and a new form, the 'ripple poem', which develops the use of 'fuzzy' rhyme.

Tenth collection by one of Britain's leading poets.