THREE MELOS PRESS PAMPHLETS: Ian Pople reviews poetry by Michele Roberts, NS Thompson and Andrew McCulloch
Michèle Roberts, The Exploding Library, ISBN 978-1-7394897-5-5
N.S. Thompson, White Collar Observations, ISBN 978-1-7394897-4-8
Andrew McCulloch, The Train of Orpheus, ISBN 978-1-7394897-6-2
All Melos Press; £6.00
William Palmer’s Melos Press continues while many other pamphlet presses have faltered. This is true even though the pamphlet does appear to be going through a bit of a Renaissance and the literary magazines, e.g., the TLS and PN Review, have columns dedicated to reviewing them. The Melos Press has also continued to publish poets whose poetics might be considered to be quite unfashionable. Two of the writers under review here write in clear rhymed and metered stanzas. Both N.S. Thompson and Andrew McCulloch are skilled practitioners of the sonnet; McCulloch even has a sequence called, ‘Linden Sonnets,’ though this latter is composed of unrhymed fourteen liners. That sequence is also made up of poems that take their inspiration from what we might consider to be more ‘classical’ subjects, each tied to the lime tree. Here we have poems that depict Baucis and Philemon; most famously written about in Ovid’s Metamorphosis. McCulloch also takes inspiration from ‘Der Lindenbaum’ which appears in Schubert’s song-cycle Winterreise. The sequence also contains a first-person monologue relating to Proust’s famous dipping of the madelaine in his Aunt’s ‘lime-blossom tea.’
N.S. Thompson also has a sonnet sequence, ‘Remembering Sonny Rollins.’ This sequence takes as its inspiration the times that the American jazz saxophonist, Sonny Rollins, frustrated by his own limitations, took to practicing in the open air on the Williamsburg Bridge in New York. Thompson’s pamphlet also has a poem referencing trumpeter, Dizzy Gillespie. But jazz figures are not the only musicians in White Collar Observations. Thompson also invokes Erik Satie, and shows some ambivalence about the electrification of folk music; not, it must be added, with the kind of vehemence that had Bob Dylan called a ‘Judas’ on the stage of Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. But the ambivalence is clearly present.
The back cover of Michèle Roberts’ The Exploding Library has a quotation from the TLS which runs ‘Michèle Roberts is one of those writers descended perhaps as much from Monet and Debussy as from Virginia Woolf or Keats.’ In part, this sense of Roberts’ literary provenance is due to her identification as half-French, half-English. It is perhaps also because of Roberts’ acute sense of the visual. That sense of the visual is clearly due to her attention to art; one of her poetry pamphlets was entitled Swimming through a painting by Bonnard. But that attention is not limited to ekphrastic poems. The title poem in Roberts’ new pamphlet from Melos, is also a short, two-poem sequence. In ‘The Exploding Library,’ Roberts describes encounters with books at Winchester Cathedral and the British Museum. In both parts, Roberts’ engagement with the books is both painterly and empathetic. This from the first part, ‘In Winchester,’
a short tunnel’s
narrow darkness
shelf-walled, filled
head to toe:
octavo volumes
close-ranked as cherubim
their backs turned.
Brown spines. Shut
chestnut wings.
Are they waiting?
Hibernating.
The second part of the ‘The Exploding Library’ sequence, ‘At the British Museum, ‘ may draw on Roberts’ experience as a novelist. In the sequence, Roberts depicts happenings from an installation in the museum by Hew Locke. One such happening is a resin and metal model installed behind the door of a cubbyhole. Elsewhere, ‘a collector in a cocked hat,’ appears. The installation embodies the relationship of so much of the early museum to ideas of Imperialism. Roberts’ quickened narrative style shows how colonialization and slavery have been so obscured by the museum until recently.
That sense of the political is also present in N.S. Thompson’s White Collar Observations, as you might assume from the title. The title poem is a satire on the white collar worker in the supermarket; their dress, their patently bourgeois habits. It is not, perhaps, the most successful poem in the pamphlet; its satire is a little too sanctimonious. Along these lines and more successful is Thompson’s ‘Market Stall, Saturday,’ where the market, its stalls and its customers are more neatly and sensitively evoked. The poem ends, ‘To have the time and cash to drive a wedge / Between the everyday and what it curbs: / the feeling freedom gives against the teeth / Of market forces grinding down the streets.’
Better still are Thompson’s ‘Remembering Sonny Rollins,’ and his poem on Satie, ‘Erik Satie at the piano: Gymnopédies.’ Thompson’s Rollins poem pictures someone playing ‘lonely on the saxophone.’ And Thompson’s naturally punchy style (in which usually a single line is a single clause or sentence) fits well with his fine and controlled description of Central Park and its surrounding urban landscape. ‘An ancient skyscraper, thin as a pin, / Floats up above communications lights, / A silver starship or a silver pen, / A sense of movement south to Brooklyn Heights.’ In lines such as these, Thompson’s natural formalism creates both verbal music and atmosphere. Thompson’s Erik Satie is refracted among sculptures that have the poses of the performers that Satie’s music reflects; perhaps these are the sculptures of Rodin and Degas whose contemporary Satie was. And Thompson’s stanza forms that alternate short and long lines, quatrains and couplets attend to the cadences of Satie’s famous pieces.
How an antique bust
Gleams marble in expressiveness and lasts
Despite itself as sunlight darts
On figure studies, bodies, plaster casts,
The curvature of hearts …
A treasury that must
diminish to dust.
Andrew McCulloch’s The Train of Orpheus takes on a subject that has attracted so many other artists that it almost feels cliched. However, it is noticeable that Ted Hughes did not include the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice in his Tales from Ovid. McCulloch’s pamphlet’s first poem-sequence, ‘Orpheus,’ is more a sustained apostrophe to Orpheus the legendary musician although McCulloch references the tale towards the end. And the second part of the sequence is a translation of a poem by Philostratus the Younger from the 3rd century CE that addresses Orpheus. As noted above, McCulloch, like Thompson, is an accomplished sonneteer, although the sonnet is not the only form that McCulloch practices with some ease. This is the opening of the third section of ‘Orpheus,’
Sail, Orpheus, beyond the sight of land,
charm your boat into the sea and pray
your soul’s music stay the rougher hand
of pelting storms that make a night of day.
and this the opening of the fifth section,
Poet, when you pursue the gleam that runs
into the earth, silvering like ore the rocks
whose narrow, jutted cracks no midday runs
have ever pierced.
McCulloch, as I’m sure he would be first to acknowledge, makes few concessions to the kind of rougher, more direct version that Hughes might have delivered. And a phrase like ‘your soul’s music stay the rougher hand,’ offers the kind of cadence that the current reader might feel deliberately turns its back on so much of contemporary poetry. McCulloch’s project and the very choice of the subject of Orpheus may be seen as, in part, rejecting so much of what contemporary poetics attempts. And we might see McCulloch rejecting much of contemporary poetry’s emphasis on the self in/and society. This sequence feels as though it is almost an appeal to Orpheus as muse, a very un-contemporary thing to be doing.
Elsewhere, McCulloch’s title poem is a bestiary which, it announces, is ‘After Guillaume Apollinaire.’ This sequence, too, is a kind of reaching back. Not only does the sequence consist of, mostly, neatly rhymed quatrains, of which this is typical,
The Hare
Do not be lustful, do not scare
Like the lover or the hare.
But like the doe, as some believe,
May your mind as quick conceive.
For all its innate poetic conservatism, there is much to appreciate in Andrew McCulloch’s The Train of Orpheus. His ‘A Berwick Triptych’ with its ekphrastic take on Vanessa Bell’s and Duncan Grant’s decorations of Berwick church in Sussex is a deeply empathetic take on their work. And it is that empathy which, actually, animates McCulloch’s views of Orpheus, and the animals in his bestiary.
May 26 2026
Three Melos Press Pamphlets
THREE MELOS PRESS PAMPHLETS: Ian Pople reviews poetry by Michele Roberts, NS Thompson and Andrew McCulloch
Michèle Roberts, The Exploding Library, ISBN 978-1-7394897-5-5
N.S. Thompson, White Collar Observations, ISBN 978-1-7394897-4-8
Andrew McCulloch, The Train of Orpheus, ISBN 978-1-7394897-6-2
All Melos Press; £6.00
William Palmer’s Melos Press continues while many other pamphlet presses have faltered. This is true even though the pamphlet does appear to be going through a bit of a Renaissance and the literary magazines, e.g., the TLS and PN Review, have columns dedicated to reviewing them. The Melos Press has also continued to publish poets whose poetics might be considered to be quite unfashionable. Two of the writers under review here write in clear rhymed and metered stanzas. Both N.S. Thompson and Andrew McCulloch are skilled practitioners of the sonnet; McCulloch even has a sequence called, ‘Linden Sonnets,’ though this latter is composed of unrhymed fourteen liners. That sequence is also made up of poems that take their inspiration from what we might consider to be more ‘classical’ subjects, each tied to the lime tree. Here we have poems that depict Baucis and Philemon; most famously written about in Ovid’s Metamorphosis. McCulloch also takes inspiration from ‘Der Lindenbaum’ which appears in Schubert’s song-cycle Winterreise. The sequence also contains a first-person monologue relating to Proust’s famous dipping of the madelaine in his Aunt’s ‘lime-blossom tea.’
N.S. Thompson also has a sonnet sequence, ‘Remembering Sonny Rollins.’ This sequence takes as its inspiration the times that the American jazz saxophonist, Sonny Rollins, frustrated by his own limitations, took to practicing in the open air on the Williamsburg Bridge in New York. Thompson’s pamphlet also has a poem referencing trumpeter, Dizzy Gillespie. But jazz figures are not the only musicians in White Collar Observations. Thompson also invokes Erik Satie, and shows some ambivalence about the electrification of folk music; not, it must be added, with the kind of vehemence that had Bob Dylan called a ‘Judas’ on the stage of Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. But the ambivalence is clearly present.
The back cover of Michèle Roberts’ The Exploding Library has a quotation from the TLS which runs ‘Michèle Roberts is one of those writers descended perhaps as much from Monet and Debussy as from Virginia Woolf or Keats.’ In part, this sense of Roberts’ literary provenance is due to her identification as half-French, half-English. It is perhaps also because of Roberts’ acute sense of the visual. That sense of the visual is clearly due to her attention to art; one of her poetry pamphlets was entitled Swimming through a painting by Bonnard. But that attention is not limited to ekphrastic poems. The title poem in Roberts’ new pamphlet from Melos, is also a short, two-poem sequence. In ‘The Exploding Library,’ Roberts describes encounters with books at Winchester Cathedral and the British Museum. In both parts, Roberts’ engagement with the books is both painterly and empathetic. This from the first part, ‘In Winchester,’
a short tunnel’s
narrow darkness
shelf-walled, filled
head to toe:
octavo volumes
close-ranked as cherubim
their backs turned.
Brown spines. Shut
chestnut wings.
Are they waiting?
Hibernating.
The second part of the ‘The Exploding Library’ sequence, ‘At the British Museum, ‘ may draw on Roberts’ experience as a novelist. In the sequence, Roberts depicts happenings from an installation in the museum by Hew Locke. One such happening is a resin and metal model installed behind the door of a cubbyhole. Elsewhere, ‘a collector in a cocked hat,’ appears. The installation embodies the relationship of so much of the early museum to ideas of Imperialism. Roberts’ quickened narrative style shows how colonialization and slavery have been so obscured by the museum until recently.
That sense of the political is also present in N.S. Thompson’s White Collar Observations, as you might assume from the title. The title poem is a satire on the white collar worker in the supermarket; their dress, their patently bourgeois habits. It is not, perhaps, the most successful poem in the pamphlet; its satire is a little too sanctimonious. Along these lines and more successful is Thompson’s ‘Market Stall, Saturday,’ where the market, its stalls and its customers are more neatly and sensitively evoked. The poem ends, ‘To have the time and cash to drive a wedge / Between the everyday and what it curbs: / the feeling freedom gives against the teeth / Of market forces grinding down the streets.’
Better still are Thompson’s ‘Remembering Sonny Rollins,’ and his poem on Satie, ‘Erik Satie at the piano: Gymnopédies.’ Thompson’s Rollins poem pictures someone playing ‘lonely on the saxophone.’ And Thompson’s naturally punchy style (in which usually a single line is a single clause or sentence) fits well with his fine and controlled description of Central Park and its surrounding urban landscape. ‘An ancient skyscraper, thin as a pin, / Floats up above communications lights, / A silver starship or a silver pen, / A sense of movement south to Brooklyn Heights.’ In lines such as these, Thompson’s natural formalism creates both verbal music and atmosphere. Thompson’s Erik Satie is refracted among sculptures that have the poses of the performers that Satie’s music reflects; perhaps these are the sculptures of Rodin and Degas whose contemporary Satie was. And Thompson’s stanza forms that alternate short and long lines, quatrains and couplets attend to the cadences of Satie’s famous pieces.
How an antique bust
Gleams marble in expressiveness and lasts
Despite itself as sunlight darts
On figure studies, bodies, plaster casts,
The curvature of hearts …
A treasury that must
diminish to dust.
Andrew McCulloch’s The Train of Orpheus takes on a subject that has attracted so many other artists that it almost feels cliched. However, it is noticeable that Ted Hughes did not include the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice in his Tales from Ovid. McCulloch’s pamphlet’s first poem-sequence, ‘Orpheus,’ is more a sustained apostrophe to Orpheus the legendary musician although McCulloch references the tale towards the end. And the second part of the sequence is a translation of a poem by Philostratus the Younger from the 3rd century CE that addresses Orpheus. As noted above, McCulloch, like Thompson, is an accomplished sonneteer, although the sonnet is not the only form that McCulloch practices with some ease. This is the opening of the third section of ‘Orpheus,’
Sail, Orpheus, beyond the sight of land,
charm your boat into the sea and pray
your soul’s music stay the rougher hand
of pelting storms that make a night of day.
and this the opening of the fifth section,
Poet, when you pursue the gleam that runs
into the earth, silvering like ore the rocks
whose narrow, jutted cracks no midday runs
have ever pierced.
McCulloch, as I’m sure he would be first to acknowledge, makes few concessions to the kind of rougher, more direct version that Hughes might have delivered. And a phrase like ‘your soul’s music stay the rougher hand,’ offers the kind of cadence that the current reader might feel deliberately turns its back on so much of contemporary poetry. McCulloch’s project and the very choice of the subject of Orpheus may be seen as, in part, rejecting so much of what contemporary poetics attempts. And we might see McCulloch rejecting much of contemporary poetry’s emphasis on the self in/and society. This sequence feels as though it is almost an appeal to Orpheus as muse, a very un-contemporary thing to be doing.
Elsewhere, McCulloch’s title poem is a bestiary which, it announces, is ‘After Guillaume Apollinaire.’ This sequence, too, is a kind of reaching back. Not only does the sequence consist of, mostly, neatly rhymed quatrains, of which this is typical,
The Hare
Do not be lustful, do not scare
Like the lover or the hare.
But like the doe, as some believe,
May your mind as quick conceive.
For all its innate poetic conservatism, there is much to appreciate in Andrew McCulloch’s The Train of Orpheus. His ‘A Berwick Triptych’ with its ekphrastic take on Vanessa Bell’s and Duncan Grant’s decorations of Berwick church in Sussex is a deeply empathetic take on their work. And it is that empathy which, actually, animates McCulloch’s views of Orpheus, and the animals in his bestiary.