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 is one of the liveliest and most inventive poets writing in Britain today. His fifth collection sees 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. ‘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… 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 ‘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. Throughout Mischief Night 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
