At thirty-eight, Roddy Lumsden is already publishing his selected poems. Mischief Night draws from four books (one unpublished) and some assorted uncollected material, and is nothing if not mischievous: from the take-that solipsism of Roddy Lumsden Is Dead ("My Pain," "My Death," "My Funeral," etc.) to the relentless randiness of The Book of Love, self-deprecation is never far from self-mythologizing, and Lumsden always keeps a jester in the throne room. This is from "Lumsden Hotel":

   when I solved the riddle of the shower,
no blood came gushing, but no water either.
By the bed, a Gideon Bible in Esperanto
and a phone-book listing Lumsdens of the world;
in the mini-bar, flat Vimto and a half-pint
of someone else's mother's milk, turned to fur.
The TV had one channel, showing highlights
from my worst performances in every sphere.
At three, in the courtyard, a chambermaid choir
sang a barbershop version of "I Will Survive."
The only time I dared to close my eyes,
dervishes under the bed began to talk dirty.

It's hard to tell whether Lumsden is essentially gloomy or essentially cheery. On balance, he seems to have the not-quite-floating, not-quite-sinking specific gravity of a depressive sensualist. His concerns are those of a certain stripe of vigorously sybaritic manhood, devoted to the immoderate pursuit of panties, pints, and poetry, and if the terms of his progress are very hazy or suspect, the terms of his progressing are abundantly clear. No anomie for Lumsden, and no chewing his nails over Dad, nature, philosophical quandaries, or the polity. He just isn't a moralist.

He is, however, extraordinarily good at the business of putting words next to each other. Lumsden freelances making quizzes and word puzzles, and has a card-shark facility with language. His enormous, well-tamed, Scottish-tinged vocabulary (dight, toom, blait, jeel, pygarg, Selbstbedienungslebensmittelgeschäft) is married to a capacity for very deft figures ("Ambition knocks—a tropical disease"). His verbal horsepower is an incontrovertible advantage, like long legs in a runner, and, because he is too sentimental to appear clever, the danger of empty virtuosity never arises. He has no particular taste for doggerel or abstruse formal hurdles. The problem facing the poems is usually how to redeem the mopiness, not how to redeem the verbiage. In one poem he weeps over a pot of lentil soup; "My Pain" begins by "trying to string together three words / which I hate more than I hate myself: / gobsmacked, hubby, and . . ." Even in his earliest work, it isn't easy to make out the seam between talent and technique, and in the newer poems the idiom is crisp, quiet, and thoroughly annealed. His mischief has a way of sneaking under sophisticated articulations of taste, and of reminding you that these articulations, like food writing, are elaborately piled on top of basic satisfactions. 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