Crocodiles and Obelisks
Jamie McKendrick Faber & Faber, 64pp, £9.99
Crocodiles and obelisks, aside frombeing ancient symbols of empire, are colloquial terms (in Italy and Russia, respectively) that refer to newspaper obituaries. In this playful, delicate collection of poems, Liverpool-born McKendrick is concerned with relics of faded power: derelict Cold War radio masts on the Spanish coast; his father’s revolver lying at the bottom of the River Mersey; the fleeting might of Mussolini.
The influence of Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias” is acknowledged: “Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair!” is the knowing exclamation towards the end of “Radio Liberty”. But McKendrick’s focus is less on the hubris of empire – personal or political – and more on how the world shifts around fixed points. In “Unfaded”, the “waxy faces” of the dead are a “serene reproach” to us for still having the capacity to improve ourselves. In “Penal Architecture”, an attempt to build Milton or Dante’s imaginary gates of hell is belittled by the capacity of the human mind to “stress the lock not the hinge/in the idea of door”.
“Obit.” is a reflection on writing a newspaper tribute to the Italian poet Attilio Bertolucci. Its final line, “the sense of loss that flowered from his hands”, touches on an uncomfortable truth: that although death can transform the living, it is a one-way process.
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