Jamie McKendrick - Böcker

Italy has produced some of the most inventive and controversial poetry of the past one hundred years. In this new anthology, all the major Italian poets of the early part of the century are well represented - Montale, Ungaretti, Saba, Quasimodo and D'Annunzio among them - poets who have filtered through to the English speaking world, and are already influential and appreciated. But many of their contemporaries from the mid-century and later are far less known - and deserve to be known - and Jamie McKendrick turns the light to them as well, including the work of Sereni, Passolini, Bertolucci and many others. 20th-Century Italian Poems is a stimulating sift through the key poets and poems of this fascinating period in European literature.

Jamie McKendrick's sixth collection starts from the far flung ('out there' is the nothing - or the something - of outer space), ascertaining the mood of an observer on Uranus, or the perils of medieval travel, or listening for the speech of alien landscapes. Closer to home, the poems adopt an outsiderish stance as they ponder the business of non-belonging and draw up wry inventories of marginality - finding room for those whom history has forgotten (the inhabitants of a drowned valley in Wales) or equally for the outcasts of natural history (the northern bald ibis, the hyena, the moa), whose skeletons are 'cairns to their own extinction'.But the poems themselves are stubborn survivors and vividly realised individuals: they take short views, make canny distinctions and tread carefully. Invoking paintings and artefacts and facades, they also add to an ongoing portrait of the artist - caught for example amidst the patiently-observed flotsam of a repeatedly flooding house -which becomes more finely drawn with each of Jamie McKendrick's collections.

Drawn from thirty years of work, this selection, made by the poet himself, gathers from the best of Jamie McKendrick's six acclaimed collections, including some translations, from 1991's debut The Sirocco Room to Out There (2012, and winner of the Hawthornden Prize) by way of The Marble Fly (1997), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and Ink Stone, shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2003. Sky Nails, his selected poems, was published by Faber in 2000, and selections of his poems have been translated and published in Holland and in Italy.Throughout, McKendrick has been concerned with the charting of space, of the distances between homeland and edgeland, the far-flung and the near-at-hand, the past and present, the familiar and the strange in poems which cast a sharp eye over their subject matter and return with wry, unsettling observations. There is remembrance, here, and salvage, a bringing to light of that which is obscured or lost, not only the ink stones in Chinese riverbeds, but extinct species, spacecraft and flooded houses, as well as historical figures, including a 10th-century physicist from Basra, Irish activist Roger Casement, and artists Gaudi, Höch and Piranesi.

New collection of poems from prizewinning poet and translator.

'Jamie McKendrick's Drypoint is an exquisite collection by one of our most resourceful and distinctive poets. . . line after line is perfectly etched, unerringly balanced and precise.' Mark Ford, TLS, Books of the Year'Cosmopolitan, self-aware and sumptuously elegant, this is a collection of riches. . .' Vona Groarke, Irish TimesJamie McKendrick's Drypoint depicts the turbulent present with incisive detail while often taking us back to an equally conflictual Biblical or classical world. Acute and stoical in tone, these poems transport us by bus or ferry or ghostly Rolls Royce to the cobbled streets of Ferrara, the once-Greek port of Smyrna, the bombed acres of Liverpool and Mariupol, and to places not to be found on any map, places where 'North was south, being lost like this'.Like his 'immigrant muntjac' the poet disregards walls and fences and breaks through 'the borders of our ruled enclosures'. The presence of translations from poets ancient and modern is another example of the way space and time are here collapsed and reconfigured in a language rich with associations, historical and vernacular.

With a number of highly-acclaimed poetry collections to his name, this well-known poet has produced a chapbook of enigmatic and beautifully-crafted poems, each of which is accompanied by an illustration by the poet who reveals himself as an accomplished artist. This will undoubtedly be a collector's piece.

Literary Activism – activism that revisits and interrogates an idea of literature – emerges from a radically altered landscape for both publishing and academia, where market pressures are effecting changes – on language, on the measuring of value, on the concept of influence – we might struggle to recognise.Taking in the roles of writer, critic, translator, academic and publisher, the essays in this volume follow no single line of enquiry. Rather, they offer the beginnings of an analysis of the literary world at a certain moment of globalization, while also questioning whether a literary world exists and, if it does, where its boundaries lie.The collection moves in many directions – from Arun Kolatkar and his near-heroic refusal of both market place and reputation; to Derek Attridge, who argues for a form of affirmative criticism which positions the critic as a ‘lover of the text’; while, from Amsterdam, Dubravka Ugrešić;reflects on life in a literary ‘out of nation zone’, adrift in a territory where intellectual protest has been stripped of ideological impetus and subsumed by the voraciousness of the market.Taken together, these essays initiate a series of conversations about who reads what and why, about the practice of writing and criticism at this particular contemporary moment, and about the activities and institutions that shape an understanding of what literature is and what it can do.Literary Activism, edited by Amit Chaudhuri, features writing from Derek Attridge, Tim Parks, Dubravka Ugrešić, Laetitia Zecchini, Peter D. Macdonald, Saikat Majumdar, Jamie McKendrick, and Swapan Chakravorty, with an afterword byJon Cook.