Sky Nails
Jamie McKendrick Faber & Faber, 115pp, £8.99
ISBN 0571201784
Her Book
Jo Shapcott Faber & Faber, 125pp, £8.99
The demise of the Oxford University Press poetry list left some of our most interesting poets without a home. Faber pounced on Jamie McKendrick and Jo Shapcott, and have done us a great service by bringing out selections from their now unavailable books. Both poets are in their early forties, have published three collections and have won the Forward Prize. They are widely admired among poets, and each writes like no one else.
McKendrick is difficult to pin down. "I was not so much born as put together," he speculates, and his is a poetry of parts. Every subject and scene is provisional, breakable, on the point of collapsing, erupting or being blown away. Threat looms in the form of an ill wind, a rock fall, a split hair or spider's web. McKendrick neither shrugs nor laments. This is the nature of things, and while he will fix them as ideas and images, he recognises in them his own precarious state. He speaks solicitously of "netted lemon groves/that hesitate on parapets so narrow/you want to talk them back to safety", but goes on to acknowledge "this need to depict/is just a weakening of the hold I have/on that rockface, a fatal stepping-backwards/onto glazed blue tiles that are tiles of air". This last image echoes the title of the collection, which comes from a time-honoured building-site prank of sending the new boy to fetch "sky nails".
McKendrick's conscious but self-effacing mediation, the way he directs his poems through himself, rather than around or towards himself, and his sensitive questioning of cause and effect, make his poetics strikingly European. His landscapes are more Continental than British, too - full of volcanoes, proper mountains, the right kind of ruination, vivid colour and brilliant seas.
Wind, light and water are the most imperceptible of his vehicles for disturbance. There are the visuals of language: "It seems we'd unwound an ampersand and/pulled it like a cracker." This image works backwards through a metaphor played on by the line break and underscored by the simile. There are less gracious vehicles, too - rickety cars, boneshakers, and the awkward embodiments of the mermaid, Frankenstein and the hippogriff. It seems that what fascinates McKendrick is what is doomed by design, built to teeter over or finish before it can start. Perhaps this is something to do with his relish of the spider's web - a short-lived, pragmatic and tenuous success. But he also notes that spiders have been shown to adapt to zero gravity by spinning webs that are, like some Platonic ideal, too perfect to succeed on Earth. Sky Nails brings out the patterns and properties of a poetry tantalised by design, and charts an impressive and strengthening body of work.
Shapcott has prefaced her selection with an envoi, the traditional send-off poets cut to their own shape. There is Ezra Pound's "Go dumb-born book" and John Berryman's "Go ill-sped book . . ." But whereas Berryman wants his to "storm out the message for her only ear", Shapcott instructs hers to "breathe yourself in his ear". This extreme and intangible kind of intimacy, and the way the book isn't carried by but becomes air, characterises Shapcott's work.
The closer the focus, the further its object breaks down. "Matter" describes a lover who "touched my skin/all afternoon/as though he could feel/the smallest particles/which make me up", who went on to reach ". . . somewhere/very deep and fingered gold - /charms, stranges, tops and gravitons". The metaphor of sub-atomic particles, traceable only by their disturbance of atmosphere, is wonderfully apt. The only danger here is the beauty of the terminology, especially when given the added lustre of "gold". Her reader might be superficially seduced by the sound of these words and might miss the subtlety of what is an exact image for something notoriously difficult to describe.
Shapcott has always used scientific imagery and ideas, starting with her first collection, Electroplating the Baby. Sensational as this title sounds, she is too good a poet to rely on curios. In this, as in later monologues such as "Pavlova's Physics" and "Quark", Shapcott lets the drama of science collide with the comedy of human thought.
She is most comfortable inhabiting a different voice, be it Marlon Brando, the mythical shape-shifter Thetis, Tom and Jerry, an excitable goat or a mad cow. She handles zoomorphism without mawkishness, entering the experience with enough confidence to avoid sounding twee, and always with the ambition of making a very human point. Her sheep are, like Rilke's, "walking clouds/and like clouds have forgotten/how to jump". What follows is an engaging but serious discourse on what it is to become earthbound.
These poems have an even tone that lulls the reader into accepting the way they veer from one extremity to another, from hard fact to the fantastic. As in the work of Elizabeth Bishop, these unruffled exteriors belie incredible swoops of perspective and thought. Shapcott adds speed by propelling her poems with hairpin-bend enjambement - a dangerous technique, but one, on the whole, well judged.
The tissue of her poetry lies in her sensitivity to language and willingness to push it into strange shapes. "Phrase Book", her second National Poetry Competition winner, splices the neologisms of the Gulf war with the archaisms of the colonial traveller. Her research is animated by and grounded in domestic, colloquial and physical detail. This well-chosen selection brings out the more discreet and more interesting aspects of a fine poet with the potential to see, and take us, further than most.
Lavinia Greenlaw is poetry critic of the "NS"
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