So Glad I’m Me

Roddy Lumsden’s So Glad I’m Me gets on with the business of living and loving. Where else would you find Caramacs and Double Deckers rubbing shoulders with Napoleon Bonaparte and ABBA, asks John Field

Enjoying a steamy bath with Madonna, sharing sweets with friends, savouring sex and cigarettes as the room spins, Roddy Lumsden’s So Glad I’m Me delights in the small things. Suffused with the bohemian eroticism of Baudelaire, Lumsden’s poems deliver a sensory overload of language by a poet equally at ease with popular and literary culture.

The collection opens with some formally constructed treasures. In ‘Nikita’s Wedding Dress’, ‘The dress is lovely but / will widen the eyes of some drawn one / neither of us know’ in a direct echo of John Donne’s ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’ where the mistress’s clothing is to stop the eyes of busy fools. Donne concludes with his domineering speaker addressing his mistress: ‘To teach thee, I am naked first’ and Lumdsen’s speaker concludes in the same way: ‘I’ll teach you / and you will marry in black’. Toying with Donne’s Jacobean strip-tease eroticism, Lumsden’s poem contains its own uncharted mysteries, tactile experiences and sensuality: ‘Black satin, black lace and black girl within. / Unknown pleasures.’ ‘Unknown pleasures’ references the debut album by the British post-punk band Joy Division, whose track titles stud the poem like sequins.

Music becomes even more important in the collection’s second section, ‘Soft Leviathan’. The blurb describes many of the poems in the collection as conflation poems, but it may be more helpful to think of them as mash-ups. The OED defines the mash-up as ‘a piece of popular music created by merging the elements of two or more existing songs using computer technology and production techniques, especially one featuring the vocals of one song over the instrumental backing of another’. (If you’re curious about the results, find Missy Elliott’s mash-up of ‘Get Ur Freak On’ with The Cure’s ‘Close to Me’ on YouTube.) The results are a sea-change into something rich and strange. And so Lumsden gives us poems like ‘Coldplay / Foreplay’ where nothing stands still: ‘I’m on the couch, a boat which I have sailed / on previous voyages’ and the metamorphic quality of the mash-up complements the poem’s chemically created ‘woozy waves’. Again, Lumsden’s poem enjoys a considered relationship with a canonical poet: this time Charles Baudelaire and the perfumed narcotics of Fleurs du Mal suffuse the collection. In ‘Parfum Exotique’, Baudelaire’s speaker is ‘led by that perfume to these lands of ease, / I see a port where many ships have flown’ and making out to music is endowed with a timelessness as we realise how many ships have berthed in this particular port.

The final section, ‘Kippers and Glitter’ offers its own stripped-down mash-ups of love. In ‘The Perfect Kiss’ (a New Order song title instead of a Joy Division one this time) Lumsden riffs, seemingly inexhaustibly, on metaphors for lovers – some familiar like Auden’s ‘my Sunday best’ and some satirising the materialism of our age: ‘my Bang and Olufsen’, ‘my cloth-shone brogue’. The language of the boozer receives the same treatment in ‘At The Standard’, where the timeless language of pub drama (Eliot’s ‘A Game of Chess’): ‘I cried all morning, said Francesca. / It’s bad, I said’ meets the obese language of the chain pub menu: ‘Now our buns are glazed, omega seeds / are scattered. Make the profiteroles large / to share’.

So Glad I’m Me effervesces with language and joy. It gets on with the business of living and loving. Where else would you find Caramacs and Double Deckers rubbing chocolatey shoulders with Napoleon Bonaparte and ABBA?

Roddy Lumsden’s So Glad I’m Me (Bloodaxe Books) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2017. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.