Singing About Melon by Luke Thompson Mary Frances All it would take is

All it would take is Marc Swan’s immensely readable fifth collection

For Anna Akhmatova the Red Army was defending the Russian language as well as Russian soil (‘we will defend you

Will there be bodies floating under the plastic pool-cover

the very means by which we extend our empathies into the world – art

is marked by the same sense of fantasy and play

Singing About Melon by Luke Thompson Mary Frances All it would take isSinging 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 Thompsons first collection, playing with sense and nonsense, the sayable and the unsayable, as well as the saying that un says. Eels, anchorites, parrots, invertebrates, a ventriloquists dummy and a mechanical squirrel are all