{"id":2173,"date":"2019-06-17T11:56:56","date_gmt":"2019-06-17T11:56:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2173"},"modified":"2019-06-17T13:16:29","modified_gmt":"2019-06-17T13:16:29","slug":"jamie-mckendricks-anomaly-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2173","title":{"rendered":"Jamie McKendrick\u2019s Anomaly – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anomaly<\/em> by Jamie McKendrick. \u00a314.99 (hardback). Faber & Faber. ISBN 9780571349210<\/p>\n

Most lovers of poetry on the page will enjoy Jamie McKendrick\u2019s sharp eye, irreverent intelligence and linguistic flair, but the urbane, sophisticated poems of Anomaly<\/em> 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<\/em> marks a change from McKendrick\u2019s 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 poems we saw the romantic, emotionally out-going side of his temperament straining against the sceptical, ironic side, sometimes achieving an explosive release, as it does in the stunning last line of \u201cObit.\u201d, from Crocodiles and Obelisks<\/em>, or soaring free of doubt more quietly, as in poems like \u201cThe Carved Buddha\u201d or \u201cThe Meeting House\u201d in Out There<\/em>. Anomaly<\/em> is suffused by a cooler, more playfully detached, Marvellian kind of irony in which different ways of looking at the same subject coexist in a calm suspension rather than fighting against each other.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll try to put flesh on these generalities by looking at \u201cEarscape\u201d:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Milton lost his sight in libertyes defence
\nand I my hearing in oyles pursuit employed
\nby factors who failed to plug our ears with down
\nI was the fuse-and-dynamite boy who blew
\nup bits of Derbyshire with blasts that lunged
\nthrough the earths crust barrelling out below
\nto stun the blind mole in its burrow and
\nbend the funicles of beetles antennae
\nso now alone or in a crowd I hear
\nthe tinny thrum of protest from the earth
\na stridulating bug-eyed orchestra
\nin the cellar of the battered dandelion
\nand out in the air beyond our telescopes
\nthe admonition of a blackened star<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The speaker seems to be someone who worked with dynamite in the oil wells of Derbyshire in his youth, presumably during the First World War, when drilling was undertaken there under the Defence of the Realm act. Now he suffers from tinnitus. The poem\u2019s sheer linguistic energy sparks lively responses that branch off in different directions, so that it seems to hold a remarkable amount within itself, jumping between the mid seventeenth century, the early twentieth and our own time, taking in different kinds of war and changing industrial relations, human and beetle perspectives, and moving through very different linguistic registers.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll come to contents and perspectives in a moment. First I want to say what holds the poem together, making different lines of thought dance round and through each other without either spinning apart or settling into a static conclusion.<\/p>\n

One thing is shapeliness of form. \u201cEarscape\u201d is a sonnet not merely in being fourteen lines long but more crucially in following the fundamental distinguishing feature of the classic Italian sonnet, its division into eight lines and six, with a turn of thought between them. Eight lines describe the violent impact of the speaker\u2019s work on Derbyshire and its smaller creatures, then six describe the long-term impact on him, or, to put it slightly differently, eight describe his action, six his punishment. His thought unfolds in logical stages that clearly fit and emphasise the contours of the verse, its phases being clearly signalled at the beginning of lines one, two, four and nine by the phrases \u201cMilton\u201d, \u201cand I\u201d, \u201cI was\u201d and finally \u201cso now\u201d.<\/p>\n

The speaker\u2019s<\/em> line of thought is clear and single but those suggested to the reader<\/em> are multiple and open-ended. Sharp changes of register bring complementary forces into play, giving impact, suppleness of tone and imaginative range. Allusions to earlier literature open wide imaginative vistas. Recognising these allusions isn\u2019t vital but they do enhance the poem\u2019s impact and meaning so I\u2019ll look at a few.<\/p>\n

Line 1 quotes Milton\u2019s \u201cSonnet xxii: To Cyriack Skinner\u201d in which Milton consoles himself for his blindness as the price of his pamphleteering battles \u201cin libertyes defence\u201d. There are elements both of cheeky humour and pathos in juxtaposing the Great Man\u2019s consciousness of having sacrificed to a noble cause and the harm casually imposed on a dynamiting nobody by his bosses. There\u2019s an element of social criticism that ties in with Tony Harrison\u2019s work, particularly the Meredithian sonnets of Continuous<\/em>. Spelling \u201coil\u201d as \u201coyle\u201d humorously mimics Miltonic English and the syntactical structure of line 2 pastiches Miltonic poetic inversion. This both strengthens the sense of travelling a distance in time and smoothes the transition between seventeenth century and modern spelling. However, particularly in the absence of punctuation, it also calls to mind Harrison\u2019s \u201cOn Not Being Milton\u201d, making the speaker seem like Tibb the Cato Street conspirator when he says, as quoted in that poem, \u201cSir I Ham a very Bad Hand at Righting\u201d.\u00a0 We catch a distant detonation from the battlefields of the class war but where Harrison passionately drives a single message home in his poem, McKendrick skimmingly touches this idea as one among many.<\/p>\n

Line 7 seems to remember Shakespeare\u2019s Pericles<\/em>, when Pericles cries \u201cThe blind mole casts \/ Copped hills towards heaven to tell the earth is thronged \/ By man\u2019s oppression\u201d. Whether that be a conscious allusion or not, the poem powerfully evokes man\u2019s violation of nature and suggests nature\u2019s punitive reaction. We touch on contemporary concerns with ecological damage. Again, the tone is complex, blending the vivid drama of \u201cstun the blind mole in its burrow\u201d with something almost cartoon-like in \u201cbend the funicles of beetles antennae. We seem to relive the excitement the lad felt as he did his dynamiting. But line 9, describing the consequences, has a gravity perhaps enhanced by a faint echo of the last stanza of \u201cThe Lake Isle of Innisfree\u201d.<\/p>\n

Broad vistas are opened by allusions but the play of light down them is particularly achieved by shimmerings of tone and changes of register, as when archaic English is followed by the graphic modern colloquialism of lines 4 – 7, especially the vigorous American \u201cbarrelling\u201d. This in turn modulates through the learned vocabulary of \u201cfunicles\u201d and \u201cstridulating\u201d to the linguistically heightened poeticism of \u201cthe admonition of a blackened star\u201d. Such mixing of registers keeps us off balance and imaginatively alert. So does the way formal satisfaction is complemented by formal surprise. For example, the sparsity of obvious rhyming heightens the impact of the powerful slant rhyme sequence, \u201cblew\u201d, \u201cbelow\u201d and \u201cburrow\u201d. Artistic boldness gives the poem imaginative freedom and suggestive range. At the same time, clarity of overall form, logical development of argument and subtlety of modulation hold its diverse impulses and suggestions together in a seamless flow, like a well-conceived mobile sculpture.<\/p>\n

The way this poem invokes other works of literature is like the way many other poems in the volume more explicitly allude to or draw on films, painting or other people\u2019s writing. All minds are consciously and unconsciously shaped by the works of other people\u2019s hands and brains. What\u2019s unusual about McKendrick is how deliberately, explicitly and continually he engages with the fact in his own writing. In \u201cArboreal\u201d he borrows Machado\u2019s celebration of a poetry of echoes and allusions, saying<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 a tree full of birds was your emblem
\nof the poet \u2013 home for wandering voices<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

He tells us that Machado valued Virgil above all for being<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 host and haven to
\na ghost-guesthood, a close-packed company<\/p>\n

of singers, without botching or mangling their notes<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

and he asks us to<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 think of the bird whose head is full of tree,
\nwho sits on the bare branch, guardian of green
\nhearing the dim hum of buds in the xylem,
\nwind rattling her cage of wet, black boughs.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Tradition and the Individual Talent indeed. The punning allusion to Hopkins\u2019 \u201cMargaret\u201d \u2013 \u201cwhat heart heard of, ghost guessed\u201d \u2013 warns us not to be po-faced about this, but what an enchanting emblem that one of a tree full of birds is, and how cleverly McKendrick develops and exemplifies it by incorporating Ezra Pound\u2019s famous image of faces in the underground as \u201cpetals on a wet black bough\u201d into his conclusion.<\/p>\n

Film and music are sources of inspiration too. \u201cBack to Black\u201d is titled after an album by Amy Whitehouse. The outstanding \u201cLa colonna sonora\u201d, meditating on the Italian phrase for \u201csoundtrack\u201d, takes us to the Taviani brothers\u2019 Padre Padrone<\/em>. Humorously reflecting on how \u201ccolonna sonora\u201d has a better ring than \u201csound track\u201d, McKendrick produces a series of vivid images that seem to me both admiring and tinged with humour at the expense of Italians\u2019 concern with dignity, grace, making a good impression, all the aspirations summed up in the phrase \u201cbella figura\u201d, and the gimcrack ways in which it\u2019s sometimes achieved.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

like a pillar of water sustaining a cloud,
\na fluted column on a celluloid plinth
\nthat turns our voices into architecture<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What\u2019s really devastating, though, is the turn in line eight that gives us the sestet\u2019s evocation of the harshness of the Sardinian shepherd boy\u2019s life in Padre Padrone<\/em>:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When I think of these sonorous columns
\nthe one that wakes in my ear is the wind loud
\nin the holm oak at the edge of his world
\nthe peasant boy hears in Padre Padrone<\/em>,
\nthe belling sheep, the cantu a ten\u00f2re<\/em>,
\nall the drone and clamour of creation
\ncrushing each creature with the force of nature.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cantu a ten\u00f2re<\/em> is a form of Sardinian folk singing in a group of four, one voice apparently traditionally imitating the wind, another a sheep bleating, another a cow lowing. After the playfulness with which the octave evokes the dignity, luxury and frivolity of civilisation enriched by art, the almost Hardyan vision of ruthless nature falls as a crushing shock.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s only quite briefly that McKendrick allows his tone to harden as much that but I think that when he does we see more fully why some of his poems are translations and why so many of his best original pieces are responses to art: however ironically he may interrogate his responses to it, I get the impression that art and the creativity it embodies are close to the centre of what seems to him to civilise and give value to life. But lest this seem too solemn or unequivocal, I should say that one of the poems that gave me most pleasure in the book was \u201cVery Fine Fake\u201d, which describes how his father bought two fake ancient coins in Athens. After his father\u2019s death, it seems, he tried to sell them. After their exposure and return by the auction house, McKendrick says<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019m glad they\u2019re back and that
\nthe stater fooled one sharp-eyed, in-house expert.
\nOn the Paul Menard principle
\nthey\u2019re finer than originals could be
\n\u2013 how much more art and subtle plotting it cost
\nto forge them more than two millennia later
\nthan just hammer out run-of-the-mill
\ncoinage for mere commodities,
\nfor goats and cabbages and olive oil.
\nUp in my loft, walled in with worthless paper,
\nI shall turn them in the light,
\nwith their two blinking owls,
\nand savour the wisdom of the counterfeit.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Serious? Tongue in cheek? Not one or the other but both, spinning between the two. It\u2019s as impossible to settle for one or the other as it is in Marvel\u2019s \u201cTo His Coy Mistress\u201d. Who could deny that it took more art and subtle plotting to make these fakes than to hammer out the originals? But \u201cOn the Paul Menard principle\u201d prepares us to see the idea as paradoxical before it\u2019s presented[1]<\/a>. The picture given by the last four lines is enchanting but the blinking owls tinge it with absurdity. At the same time, uselessness or gratuitousness is one of art\u2019s most blessed qualities.<\/p>\n

Many pleasures come together in these poems \u2013 urbanity, wit, sharp intelligence, formal inventiveness, linguistic flair and a constant, impish sense of fun animating serious reflection. It\u2019s a book I\u2019d highly recommend, though it may disappoint those who look above all for unequivocal positions and intense emotion in their poetry.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> The reference is to Jorge Luis Borges\u2019 brilliant short story \u201cPierre Menard, Author of the Quixote<\/em>\u201d. \u201cPaul\u201d must be a misprint or slip of the memory.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I would like to thank David Cooke for permission to repost this review, which has just appeared in The High Window. You can see it and excellent reviews by\u00a0 other reviewers by clicking here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anomaly by Jamie McKendrick. \u00a314.99 (hardback). Faber & Faber. ISBN 9780571349210 Most lovers of poetry on the page will enjoy Jamie McKendrick\u2019s 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 […]<\/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-2173","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\/2173"}],"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=2173"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2180,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2173\/revisions\/2180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}