Böcker av Jamie McKendrick

Jamie McKendrick's Drypoint depicts the turbulent present with incisive detail while often taking us back to an equally conflictual Biblical or classical world. Acute and stoical in tone, these poems transport us by bus or ferry or ghostly Rolls Royce to the cobbled streets of Ferrara, the once-Greek port of Smyrna, the bombed acres of Liverpool and Mariupol, and to places not to be found on any map, places where 'North was south, being lost like this'. Like his 'immigrant muntjac' the poet disregards walls and fences and breaks through 'the borders of our ruled enclosures'. The presence of translations from poets ancient and modern is another example of the way space and time are here collapsed and reconfigured in a language rich with associations, historical and vernacular.

With a number of highly-acclaimed poetry collections to his name, this well-known poet has produced a chapbook of enigmatic and beautifully-crafted poems, each of which is accompanied by an illustration by the poet who reveals himself as an accomplished artist. This will undoubtedly be a collector's piece.

Drawn from thirty years of work, this selection gathers from the best of the author's six acclaimed collections, including some translations, from 1991's debut The Sirocco Room to Out There (2012, and winner of the Hawthornden Prize) by way of The Marble Fly (1997), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and Ink Stone.

Jamie McKendrick's sixth collection starts from the far flung ('out there' is the nothing - or the something - of outer space), ascertaining the mood of an observer on Uranus, or the perils of medieval travel, or listening for the speech of alien landscapes. Closer to home, the poems adopt an outsiderish stance as they ponder the business of non-belonging and draw up wry inventories of marginality - finding room for those whom history has forgotten (the inhabitants of a drowned valley in Wales) or equally for the outcasts of natural history (the northern bald ibis, the hyena, the moa), whose skeleons are 'cairns to their own extinction'.But the poems themselves are vivid and stubbornly realised individuals: they take short views, make canny distinctions and tread carefully. Invoking paintings and artefacts and facades, they also add to an ongoing portrait of the artist - caught for example amidst the patiently-observed flotsam of a repeatedly flooding house -which becomes more finely drawn with each of Jamie McKendrick's collections.

Crocodiles and obelisks are ancient symbols of empire. The poems in Jamie McKendrick's astonishing new collection sift the debris of power and range from Mussolini's Italy and Franco's Spain to the Belgian Congo and to the Roman, the Austro-Hungarian and British empires. But 'crocodiles' and 'obelisks' are also terms used for newspaper obituaries - for tributes which either monumentalize the dead or shed false tears for them. Crocodiles & Obelisks is McKendrick's most individual work to date, and experiments with different ways of remembering, offering conclusions that are both cunning and drole.

The best ink stones are slates from Chinese riverbeds, but in the long history of their use these have all been found. As one expert writes, 'the better the stone, the smaller and more consistent the particles will be and the denser the ink.' These new poems by Jamie McKendrick have a remarkable density of ink. They explore the grain, or 'tooth', of the natural world with unusual and discomforting detail at the same time as they chart the medium they work in - not only what the eye sees, but the eye itself: its structure and structurings. These poems open onto conflicting perspectives of home and abroad, the domestic and the wild, the natural and the uncanny, elegy and celebration.