This sixth collection showcases the evolution of a prize-winning poet's voice, offering readers a rich tapestry of themes and emotions. Through innovative language and vivid imagery, the poet explores personal and universal experiences, inviting deep reflection on life, love, and loss. Each poem is crafted with precision, revealing the intricacies of human connection and the beauty found in everyday moments. Fans of contemporary poetry will find this collection both resonant and thought-provoking.
Drawn from thirty years of work, this selection, made by the poet himself, gathers from the best of Jamie McKendrick'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, shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2003. Sky Nails, his selected poems, was published by Faber in 2000, and selections of his poems have been translated and published in Holland and in Italy. Throughout, McKendrick has been concerned with the charting of space, of the distances between homeland and edgeland, the far-flung and the near-at-hand, the past and present, the familiar and the strange in poems which cast a sharp eye over their subject matter and return with wry, unsettling observations. There is remembrance, here, and salvage, a bringing to light of that which is obscured or lost, not only the ink stones in Chinese riverbeds, but extinct species, spacecraft and flooded houses, as well as historical figures, including a 10th-century physicist from Basra, Irish activist Roger Casement, and artists Gaudi, Höch and Piranesi.
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.
'A coolly marshalled, worldly intelligence seems to be able to take on any
subject from the quotidian to the arcane. The language is alert to
contemporary nuance and opulently, exhilaratingly multi-layered.' William Boyd
