Jamie McKendrick Drypoint (Faber, 2024)
John Burnside Blossom, Ruin (Cape, 2024)
Jeremy Hooker Preludes (Shearsman Books, 2024)

The title poem of Drypoint, Jamie McKendrick’s seventh collection, focuses on the burin or chisel in the process of engraving. It relishes its capacity to erase, its ‘magic of undoing’, which produces a tabula rasa. The second half of McKendrick’s poem immediately laments the fact that in the reality of his own experience no such ‘burnisher exists … to restore  the calm clear surface of [his] thoughtlessness’. Even as it curates the past McKendrick’s collection is aware of the creative and poetic potential of a combination of forgetting and remembering, the continuities and discontinuities of the self experiencing a life.

The collection as a whole is split into three sections – ‘Myrrh’, ‘Far and Near’, and ‘The Years’ – and attends to the burden of experience and memory across a lifetime and its different geographical locations. These include his native Liverpool, Ferrara, Smyrna, and Mariupol. As we have come to expect from a writer as cosmopolitan and learned as McKendrick, those geographies are rich and many and include those produced out of his work as a translator and poet of other literatures.

‘He Be Me’ offers a playful take on the self-chastening at the heart of this curation of the self in relation to time. Here, McKendrick imagines meeting a younger version of himself in a bar. The doubling up on himself elicits a salutary critique of his own weaknesses both now and then. It also resists any straightforward or conventional reach ...