Drypoint

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.