Anomaly by Jamie McKendrick. £14.99 (hardback). Faber & Faber. ISBN 9780571349210

Most lovers of poetry on the page will enjoy Jamie McKendrick’s sharp eye, irreverent intelligence and linguistic flair, but the urbane, sophisticated poems of Anomaly will have a more particular appeal for those who enjoy a play of thought too mobile and finely poised to lock itself down into conclusions. In this way Anomaly marks a change from McKendrick’s previous collections. None of the new poems have the emotional intensity of some of his earlier ones but this is not through loss of poetic power. In many of those earlier … Continue Reading

Helen Dunmore, Counting Backwards: Poems 1975–2017 Bloodaxe Books, 416 pp, £14.99

PN Review subscribers can find my review here.

This is a remarkable poem. You can link to an earlier version of its text than the one in Emerald by following this link to the praccrit.com website, where there’s also an interview with Padel.

The poem opens “When we went down into the cave / this summer”. I’ve had a nagging sense of something oracular and dramatic lurking behind those breathless rhythms and it suddenly hit me what it was – the opening of Ezra Pound’s Canto I:

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and … Continue Reading