Lumsden moved to London at the end of 1997, staying in Stoke Newington. He quickly became known for staging events at
The Poetry Society in
Covent Garden (he would later serve as the charity’s vice chair) and was part of the second iteration of a writing group that met at The Lamb pub in Bloomsbury – other members of this group included
Michael Donaghy,
Hugo Williams,
Maurice Riordan,
Paul Farley,
Greta Stoddart and
John Stammers. Whilst in Stoke Newington, Lumsden became involved with the London spoken word poetry scene due to his friendship with Tim Wells and Tim Turnbull. He was seen by many as an instrumental figure in the breaking down of barriers between 'page' and 'stage' in the years to come. Lumsden’s second collection
The Book of Love (2000) cemented his burgeoning reputation, securing a
Poetry Book Society Choice and being shortlisted for both the
T. S. Eliot Prize and
The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
Roddy Lumsden is Dead followed in 2001. In the same year, Lumsden co-edited
Anvil New Poets 3 with Hamish Ironside, and this ushered in a new phase of Lumsden as a mentor and promoter of emerging voices on the UK poetry scene. In 2001 he was awarded an
Arts Council of England International Fellowship at the
Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, an experience which he recorded in the poems 'For Jesus', 'Turning Into Grizzly Street' and 'From the Valentine Studio' in
Mischief Night. Several residency projects followed, including what he described as being "poet-in-residence to the music industry" and a stint at the St Andrews Bay Hotel in 2002, a five-star hotel and golf resort in St Andrews, which resulted in the pamphlet
The Bubble Bride. By now Lumsden was teaching for The Poetry School, where his role in its early years was described by
Mimi Khalvati as "absolutely instrumental in making the School what it is today". After the untimely death of
Michael Donaghy in 2004, Lumsden then took over the teaching of Donaghy’s influential evening class at
City, University of London. involved Moss wearing seven different dresses over the course of two days, with Lumsden writing a poem for each one. The resulting video features Moss in silhouette wearing her favourite dress from the shoot whilst she reads the poem Lumsden wrote for that dress. He also wrote a diary of the event. He did editing work on several prize-winning poetry collections and the Pilot series of pamphlets by poets under 30 for
Tall Lighthouse. He was organiser and host of the monthly reading series BroadCast, held upstairs at the
Poetry Society offices on Betterton Street,
Covent Garden.
Third Wish Wasted was published in 2009, poems from which were awarded the Bess Hokin Prize by the
Poetry Foundation. The book was launched at the
StAnza Poetry Festival in St Andrews on 21 March 2009, with a reading that was recorded by Bloodaxe Books and which is still available on YouTube. Between 2010 and 2015, he was Poetry Editor for
Salt Publishing, responsible for commissioning over thirty individual collections, and for whom he was also Series Editor of The Best British Poetry anthologies. A sixth collection,
Terrific Melancholy, was published in 2011, followed by
Not All Honey in 2014. Of the latter, Laurie Donaldson in the Glasgow Review of Books noted Lumsden's invention of new poetic forms: kernel poems (e.g. 'The Bells of Hope'), the sevenling ("two sets of three line verses, finishing with a summary line that closes the poem off") and the hebdomad ("nine tercets that draw together separate details and thoughts over a certain time period, the conjunction of which is helped by the coincidences and serendipity of everyday life"). Of the collection as a whole, Donaldson suggests the inventive word-play shows the poems to be "more ludic than febrile [...] Inherent in all this is a musicality, reinforcing Lumsden’s belief that poetry should be read aloud." Reviewing the book, Alison Craig suggested: "This is poetry as an extreme sport, a whole world of shifting ideas with people – dead and alive – dropping in, whispering in your ear, or just walking right through, bold as brass." Of the book's central themes, she noted a number of poems "dealt with our essential one-ness, exploring whether it is possible to overcome the two-ness that we find in our lives, what it is to be 'me', how 'me' can be changed when memory jogs in, when places change and are not as we thought [...] More than this, though, is separation within the self, the difficulty of finding a constant self as time moves on and the people and places we think we knew – that helped form our identity – change, so that the self becomes divided across memory and time." == Illness and death (2016-2020) ==