Anomaly

In a period when nations are retracting within their borders, the vivid and intricate poems of Jamie McKendrick's new collection Anomaly are especially timely, and speak of a fragile legacy of openness and interconnectedness. The poems playfully twin Bologna and Bombay, the South Downs and the Camargue, the imagined and the actual. Often intensely visual, here more than ever, McKendrick's poems engage with artists as various as the Taviani brothers, Sánchez Cotán, Bhupen Khakhar and Giacometti, and are as alive to the sea-bound cityscapes of Liverpool and Venice as to the rocky landscapes of Sardinia and Slovenia.

Jamie McKendrick was born in Liverpool in 1955. He is author of seven collections of poetry and has won the Forward Prize for Best Collection (The Marble Fly, 1997), the Hawthornden Prize (Out There, 2012) and the Cholmondeley Award (2019). He has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award. His translations of Valerio Magrelli's poetry (The Embrace, 2009) won the Oxford-Weidenfeld and the John Florio prizes.