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. ‘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, Poetry. ‘One of the best poets writing in English on the planet today’ – Don Share, Squandermania. ‘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, Verse.
