Selected poems - Jamie McKendrick

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,
Hch and Piranesi.