Poems Singing About Melons

04 November 2020

Luke Thompson Singing About Melon
Luke Thompson Singing About Melon
Type: Text
Category: University news

Luke Thompson, Senior Lecturer and Course Leader at the School of Communication, recently had a new book of poems published called Singing About Melon. It contains 50 intriguing poems.  

Published by Shearsman, they explain that Singing About Melon opens with a call for silence: ‘Silenzio’. This is the self-defeating shout of the guards in the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, where several of the poems are placed.  

It is a call that echoes through Luke’s first collection of poems, playing with sense and nonsense, the sayable and the unsayable, as well as the saying that un-says. 

Eels, anchorites, parrots, invertebrates, a ventriloquist’s dummy and a mechanical squirrel are all deployed in this exploration of sense and silence through themes of bodily identity, grief, the divine and other species.  

Two prominent poets have written about the title, Mona Arshi and Isabel Galleymore.  

Mona said of the book, “A rare book – both strange and exhilarating; poems which bore and drill into the reader’s mind much like the earthworms, eels and other tiny guests vibrating on the pages.” 

Isabel shared her thoughts;“Skilfully precise and playfully mischievous, these poems embrace the spiritual, the cartoonish and everything in between with a mindful sensibility.” 

Luke worked with Falmouth alumnus Mairead Dunne to produce the beautiful cover for his book.  

Take a look at the book

 

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