Singing About Melon

<p><em>Singing About Melon</em> 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 Thompson’s first collection playing with sense and nonsense the sayable and the unsayable as well as the saying that un-says.<br />       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.</p><p> </p><p>“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.” —Mona Arshi.</p><p> </p><p>“Skilfully precise and playfully mischievous these poems embrace the spiritual the cartoonish and everything in between with a mindful sensibility.” —Isabel Galleymore</p>