Melt and Solve

Synopsis

In 2013 the poet Roddy Lumsden suffered a serious concussion. The head injury left him devoid of creativity, impersonating himself in an effort to rediscover his own identity. Four months later, a late night conversation led to a radical experiment that would see him return to writing with a daring project. This book is that extraordinary work.

As the poet says, “The series of plaintive poems entertains the idea of sentimentality. It encourages fetishes, by which I mean repeated references and name dropping. It is 'hand on heart' stuff. Sweeping, indulgent last lines, often. Emotional, evoking the mood I found myself in as I recovered, solved.”

Praise for Previous Work

‘There is a level of talent that will ransom any project in any school. On the one hand, it will be interesting to see where Lumsden goes next; on the other, he's so good that it hardly matters.’ —D.H. Tracy

‘One of the best poets writing in English on the planet today.’ —Don Share

‘Although the verse is hopping with linguistic antics, the foci of the language are music and rhetoric and, whip-smart as these poems are, they tend to resist chin-stroking analysis – the rhymes, the larks, the brutal punch-lines tug Lumsden's poems off the page and into the living context they describe.’ —Matthew Smith