I can happily recommend Paul Muldoon’s anthology of old and new sonnets Scanty Plot of Ground, which I read with real pleasure. Before opening it I thought it might include something by Jamie McKendrick. Many of my favourite poems by him involve brilliant reworkings of different aspects of sonnet form. Unfortunately my circumstances at the moment make it impossible to write a piece exploring this. However, I can’t resist the temptation to repost something about one of his poems that I wrote for the London Grip:

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 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.

Clicking on its title will take you to my perhaps absurdly detailed discussion of one McKendrick sonnet I find profoundly moving and haunting, “The Carved Buddha” from Out There. I discuss some others in a more general review of Anomaly but all his books are full of fine examples of his skill in remodelling the form.