McKendrick\u2019s poetry is brilliant at making you feel the prosaic physical substance of things. It\u2019s learned, crammed with fascinating snippets of information. The tone tends to be dry, sceptical, downbeat. He\u2019s a wit whose mind keeps leaping off in unexpected directions. All these qualities gave me great pleasure in themselves. More, they act as foil to and somehow a validation of brief bursts of soaring or piercing lyricism.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the title poem:<\/p>\n
If space begins at an indefinite zone
\nwhere the chance of two gas molecules colliding
\nis rarer than a green dog or a blue moon
\nthen that\u2019s as near as we can get to nothing.<\/p>\n
Nostalgia for the earth and its atmosphere
\nweakens the flesh and bones of cosmonauts.
\nOne woke to find his crewmate in a space suit
\nand asked where he was going. For a walk.<\/p>\n
He had to sleep between him and the air-lock.
\nAnother heard a dog bark and a child cry
\nhalfway to the moon. What once had been<\/p>\n
where heaven was, is barren beyond imagining,
\nand never so keenly as from out there can
\nthe lost feel earth\u2019s the only paradise.<\/p>\n
This gets its vast imaginative reach from literary allusion as well as the sheer idea of space. Line 14 echoes Wallace Stevens (\u201cshall the earth \/ Seem all of paradise that we shall know?\u201d) and links to the volume\u2019s epigraph: \u201cQuesto aiuolo che ci fa tanto feroci<\/i> (This little patch of earth that makes us all so fierce) Dante, Paradiso<\/i>\u201d.\u00a0 In such a context, \u201cthe lost\u201d poignantly compares cosmonauts to the \u201cperduta gente\u201d of the inscription over the gates of hell in the Inferno<\/i>. For most of the poem, though, McKendrick\u2019s manner is deceptively light, tinged with humour and irony. It invites reading between the lines. Pauses give breathing-space for implications to sink in and reactions to form \u2013 reactions to the looming horror behind the simple words of stanzas two and three, for example, or the way the banal phrasing of line 8 makes us almost feel<\/i> the difference between the homeliness of earth and the vacancy of space. This makes the first three stanzas seem devastatingly understated and underwrites the powerful climax.<\/p>\n
A skilful mixing of registers is one of the pleasures of McKendrick\u2019s work. In Out There<\/i> the syntax is often of a kind we\u2019d associate with formal discursive writing. This goes with the use of much learned and even abstruse vocabulary, but it\u2019s counterpointed by colloquialism and slang. This vivifies arcane information, brings things home imaginatively and keeps our responses alertly unsettled. The only poems that really disappointed me were two about people. \u201cLast Visit\u201d and \u201cMademoiselle Garde\u201d are full of beautifully written passages that become intensely poignant when you break them up into separate phrases and sentences but as whole poems they\u2019re curiously flat, flowing so seamlessly that they give no space for your own reactions to come through.<\/p>\n
I’d like to thank Peter and Ann Sansom for permission to post this piece, which appeared in The North 51.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
McKendrick\u2019s poetry is brilliant at making you feel the prosaic physical substance of things. It\u2019s learned, crammed with fascinating snippets of information. The tone tends to be dry, sceptical, downbeat. He\u2019s a wit whose mind keeps leaping off in unexpected directions. All these qualities gave me great pleasure in themselves. More, they act as foil […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jamie-mckendrick"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1455"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1457,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455\/revisions\/1457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}