Faber & Faber

Crocodiles & Obelisks: Jamie McKendrick

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Synopsis:

'Crocodile' and 'obelisk' are Italian and Russian terms, respectively, for a newspaper obituary - the one shedding false tears, the other monumentalising or aggrandising the dead. The poems in Jamie McKendrick's astonishing new collection explore and experiment with different ways of remembering: with being crocodiles or obelisks.

These are also ancient symbols of empire - Egyptian and Roman respectively - and many of the poems sift the debris of power, in settings such as Franco's Spain, the Italy of Mussolini, the Belgian Congo and the Austro-Hungarian and British empires. Naming names, the collection is stalked by the legacies of a cast of unreconciled and ghostly presences - from Ibn al-Haitham, the Basra-born 10th-century physicist, or the medieval Spanish king Alfonso the Wise, to the Irish patriot and activist Sir Roger Casement; from Joseph Albers and Hannah Hoch to Gaudi and Piranesi. Several poems are set in prisons, infamous sites whose legacies shadow the extraordinary renditions of the present.

As Sean O'Brien has remarked, there is a pervasive sense in McKendrick's poems 'that the observer, the latecomer, is as inextricably bound up in history as the original actors'. The lessons of this new collection are cunning, droll, laconically exact. Above all, these poems challenge Philip Larkin's epigram that poetry must be concerned with the self, whereas prose is concerned with others. Crocodiles and Obelisks is a canvas crowded with other people, and yet is Jamie McKendrick's most individual work to date.

Tags:

Categorised as:

Poetry

Sub-categories:

Poetry Collections

Genres & Themes:

Empires; Recollection

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