Poetry review – DRYPOINT: Edmund Prestwich admires the skill and economy in Jamie McKendrick’s poetry which leaves room for the reader’s own imagination
Drypoint
Jamie McKendrick
Faber & Faber Ltd
ISBN: 978-0-571-38451-8
£12.99
The polished skill of McKendrick’s writing gives continual pleasure. It can appear as simple beauty of phrasing and artistic shaping, as in “Frankincense”, which begins ‘Flying serpents guard the incense trees’ and ends ‘The notched bark heals by slow degrees / and a mauve silence wreaths the incense trees.’ This poem is unusual, though, in that an almost Tennysonian mellifluousness is sustained throughout. On the level of meaning, the beauty of sound and the myth-flavoured imagery are counterpointed by hints at contemporary evils, but this is quietly done. Usually, the counterpointing is more emphatic. It’s here, in fact, that McKendrick’s skill finds its most characteristic expression. He brings together wildly disparate tones, verbal registers and references, shifting between viewpoints and making them collide with each other in a way that’s both immediately enjoyable and opens vistas of reflection that go on expanding long after the initial delight. These shifts and collisions make his writing feel thrillingly alive and sensitive to the complexity of existence. Neither McKendrick’s presentation of colliding forces in experience nor his changes of stylistic gear are artistically jarring or discomposing, though. On the level of sense, they’re lightened and brightened by a continual play of wit, sometimes exuberantly relishing contradiction, sometimes accepting it in a spirit of rueful good humour; in formal terms, they’re made smooth and artistically satisfying by adroit handling of cadence and metre. An example of this easy handling of transitions would be the beginning of “Myrrh”. Evoking memories of preaching and bible reading, its first three words evoke a tone of unctuous sanctimony that’s immediately brought down to earth, perhaps not so much punctured as complemented, by the streetwise warning that follows. However, this warning is itself released from earnestness by the comic absurdity of its terms:
Consider the lilies: with the utmost care
if you’re a cat, as every part
of the plant – its stem, its leaves, its pollen –
will be fatally toxic and result
in liver failure. For the rest of us,
consideration is its own reward,
a triumph of aesthetics over ethics.
Short or very short as they mostly are, these poems take the reader on what feel like rapid journeys. They tend to start with a bang, grabbing attention with an opening line or pair of lines that both startles and begs questions. Surprise then follows surprise till the piece ends in a resonant line that seems to gather all the poem’s earlier energies into itself and create a satisfying sense of artistic completion. Crucially, though, this moment of completion isn’t the end point of the reading experience. You might almost call it its real beginning. As the words of the poem drop away, rather like the first stages of a multistage rocket, the real payload of its suggestive life unfolds in silence in the reader’s imagination.
Suggestions ripple out in many directions partly because McKendrick leaves the reader so much freedom of response and partly because his poems juxtapose ideas from so many different sources, making them play against and into each other. In this way he makes the fruits of a rich international culture easily and playfully but also seriously available to the general reader. There are whole poems translated from a number of medieval and modern Italians as well as the Spanish Machado and the Austrian Rilke. These interplay with poems about works of art, about religious iconography, about McKendrick’s experiences in his Liverpudlian youth and his later life on the Continent, about animals, about the passing of time, about craft and making, in ways that are sometimes explicit but often subtle and indirect. An example of the explicit kind would be the near-juxtaposition of a vivid translation of an episode in Dante’s Purgatorio in which angels ward off the attempted intrusion of a devil in the form of a snake among a group of souls waiting to enter Purgatory proper and a poem about the appearance of a nervous escaped python in the poet’s garden.
I’d like to finish by quoting a whole poem that illustrates some of the things I particularly like about McKendrick’s work while also achieving a particular greatness of its own. Fourteen lines long, like many of his pieces at all stages of his career, “Alternative Anatomy”, describing a hawk moth, is an ethereally thinned version of a reversed sonnet (one in which the sestet precedes the octave): it’s written in short, irregular lines, and has only a few highly attenuated rhymes. The irregularity and attenuation both suit the idea of the moth’s fragility and erratic flight (itself brilliantly captured by the line end pause in ‘cleverly / erratic’). I think they have another important effect. The whole poem is brought beautifully and delicately to rest by the way the last two lines move to the iambic pulse of the dominant tradition in English metrics and of the traditional sonnet in English. However, the unpredictable rhythms before that point seem to contribute to its lightness of imaginative touch and the consequent extremely open way in which its suggestiveness works. This gives it a vast imaginative reach with many overlapping circles of suggestion. Short lines isolate images and phrases, letting each resonate in the pause or blank space at the line ending. Shimmering between overwhelming extremes of light and darkness, between poles of miniaturist empathy and geographical or even cosmic vastness, and between anthropomorphic and naturalistic imaginings of moth and bat, glancing in its imagery at archaic and modern industrial techniques, at marine, submarine and aerial navigation and at the mechanics of making music, vividly evoking both the cruelty and the marvellous intricacy of the natural order, it doesn’t push the reader towards a conclusion but opens multiple vistas of reflection that he’s free to follow or not as he wills. The whole poem gives a beautiful sense of completeness, but this is entirely a matter of artistic shaping, not of the expression of an idea, and it seems to me that the abstention from any kind of intellectual conclusion that would have limited the reader’s freedom of response is as much a beauty of the poem as its shaping is.
In the fragile hearing of the hawk moth
so much has to be suppressed
by a tamp as of felt
that cloaks the anvils on her thorax
when the world’s hammer
incessantly strikes.
How else could the hinged sails
of her wings pivot so cleverly
erratic as they steer her
towards the almost blinding
source of light
and away from the horror clicks
the bats have engineered
to scan the depth of dark?
I’ve mentioned the humour that gives so much pleasure in this book. I think this poem goes beyond humour to achieve a deeper, more remarkable greatness. Humour accepts contradiction but its doing so is itself still a particular response. It would be an intrusion on the stark yet infinitely delicate way this poem balances opposing visions of horror and joy, achieving lightness by miniaturising them without diminishing their force. Its refraction of vast ideas in modestly miniaturist form reminds me of the English Civil War poet Andrew Marvell, and the question that forms its second sentence reminds me of the conclusion of his poem “The Garden”.
Aug 24 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Jamie McKendrick
Poetry review – DRYPOINT: Edmund Prestwich admires the skill and economy in Jamie McKendrick’s poetry which leaves room for the reader’s own imagination
The polished skill of McKendrick’s writing gives continual pleasure. It can appear as simple beauty of phrasing and artistic shaping, as in “Frankincense”, which begins ‘Flying serpents guard the incense trees’ and ends ‘The notched bark heals by slow degrees / and a mauve silence wreaths the incense trees.’ This poem is unusual, though, in that an almost Tennysonian mellifluousness is sustained throughout. On the level of meaning, the beauty of sound and the myth-flavoured imagery are counterpointed by hints at contemporary evils, but this is quietly done. Usually, the counterpointing is more emphatic. It’s here, in fact, that McKendrick’s skill finds its most characteristic expression. He brings together wildly disparate tones, verbal registers and references, shifting between viewpoints and making them collide with each other in a way that’s both immediately enjoyable and opens vistas of reflection that go on expanding long after the initial delight. These shifts and collisions make his writing feel thrillingly alive and sensitive to the complexity of existence. Neither McKendrick’s presentation of colliding forces in experience nor his changes of stylistic gear are artistically jarring or discomposing, though. On the level of sense, they’re lightened and brightened by a continual play of wit, sometimes exuberantly relishing contradiction, sometimes accepting it in a spirit of rueful good humour; in formal terms, they’re made smooth and artistically satisfying by adroit handling of cadence and metre. An example of this easy handling of transitions would be the beginning of “Myrrh”. Evoking memories of preaching and bible reading, its first three words evoke a tone of unctuous sanctimony that’s immediately brought down to earth, perhaps not so much punctured as complemented, by the streetwise warning that follows. However, this warning is itself released from earnestness by the comic absurdity of its terms:
Short or very short as they mostly are, these poems take the reader on what feel like rapid journeys. They tend to start with a bang, grabbing attention with an opening line or pair of lines that both startles and begs questions. Surprise then follows surprise till the piece ends in a resonant line that seems to gather all the poem’s earlier energies into itself and create a satisfying sense of artistic completion. Crucially, though, this moment of completion isn’t the end point of the reading experience. You might almost call it its real beginning. As the words of the poem drop away, rather like the first stages of a multistage rocket, the real payload of its suggestive life unfolds in silence in the reader’s imagination.
Suggestions ripple out in many directions partly because McKendrick leaves the reader so much freedom of response and partly because his poems juxtapose ideas from so many different sources, making them play against and into each other. In this way he makes the fruits of a rich international culture easily and playfully but also seriously available to the general reader. There are whole poems translated from a number of medieval and modern Italians as well as the Spanish Machado and the Austrian Rilke. These interplay with poems about works of art, about religious iconography, about McKendrick’s experiences in his Liverpudlian youth and his later life on the Continent, about animals, about the passing of time, about craft and making, in ways that are sometimes explicit but often subtle and indirect. An example of the explicit kind would be the near-juxtaposition of a vivid translation of an episode in Dante’s Purgatorio in which angels ward off the attempted intrusion of a devil in the form of a snake among a group of souls waiting to enter Purgatory proper and a poem about the appearance of a nervous escaped python in the poet’s garden.
I’d like to finish by quoting a whole poem that illustrates some of the things I particularly like about McKendrick’s work while also achieving a particular greatness of its own. Fourteen lines long, like many of his pieces at all stages of his career, “Alternative Anatomy”, describing a hawk moth, is an ethereally thinned version of a reversed sonnet (one in which the sestet precedes the octave): it’s written in short, irregular lines, and has only a few highly attenuated rhymes. The irregularity and attenuation both suit the idea of the moth’s fragility and erratic flight (itself brilliantly captured by the line end pause in ‘cleverly / erratic’). I think they have another important effect. The whole poem is brought beautifully and delicately to rest by the way the last two lines move to the iambic pulse of the dominant tradition in English metrics and of the traditional sonnet in English. However, the unpredictable rhythms before that point seem to contribute to its lightness of imaginative touch and the consequent extremely open way in which its suggestiveness works. This gives it a vast imaginative reach with many overlapping circles of suggestion. Short lines isolate images and phrases, letting each resonate in the pause or blank space at the line ending. Shimmering between overwhelming extremes of light and darkness, between poles of miniaturist empathy and geographical or even cosmic vastness, and between anthropomorphic and naturalistic imaginings of moth and bat, glancing in its imagery at archaic and modern industrial techniques, at marine, submarine and aerial navigation and at the mechanics of making music, vividly evoking both the cruelty and the marvellous intricacy of the natural order, it doesn’t push the reader towards a conclusion but opens multiple vistas of reflection that he’s free to follow or not as he wills. The whole poem gives a beautiful sense of completeness, but this is entirely a matter of artistic shaping, not of the expression of an idea, and it seems to me that the abstention from any kind of intellectual conclusion that would have limited the reader’s freedom of response is as much a beauty of the poem as its shaping is.
I’ve mentioned the humour that gives so much pleasure in this book. I think this poem goes beyond humour to achieve a deeper, more remarkable greatness. Humour accepts contradiction but its doing so is itself still a particular response. It would be an intrusion on the stark yet infinitely delicate way this poem balances opposing visions of horror and joy, achieving lightness by miniaturising them without diminishing their force. Its refraction of vast ideas in modestly miniaturist form reminds me of the English Civil War poet Andrew Marvell, and the question that forms its second sentence reminds me of the conclusion of his poem “The Garden”.