Singing About Melon by Luke Thompson Mary Frances Will there be bodies floating

Will there be bodies floating under the plastic pool-cover

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

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 Will there be bodies floatingSinging 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