The Years, Jamie McKendrick (Arc Publications) £8

Reviewed by Paul McLoughlin

The Years opens with a pair of unrhymed sonnets, the second of which sets out with a fine addition to my cache of favourite line breaks: A life of doing nothing is a life / well-lived (which is almost as good as Bernard O’Donoghue’s These days what fills me with the greatest / Sense of achievement is getting out / Of doing things, from another poem on ageing). McKendrick’s poem is called ‘Doing Nothing’, a reversal of the opening ‘Nothing Doing’ in which a heron gazes with sheer disgust at the water in a pool left undrained to shiver through the winter where nothing moves that’s worth a sprat. In the sestet, the poet-speaker, whose quiff quivers and whose beak / is sharp as a tack shows that he not only empathises with but has become the heron. The turn gives us access to this metamorphosis: I know the feeling .. The world is a con. This is a poet enjoying himself, his cleverness a delight, as is that of John Fuller, to whom O’Donoghue’s poem, ‘Getting Out’, is dedicated.

The ‘thurn-harrier’ in the hybrid sonnet-villanelle of that name is a bailiff beetle that earns its hire evicting a mythical-fictitious creature (the thurn) by harrying it from its home. Once again the anthropomorphic-personification palimpsest is evident when the thurn stuffs pamphlets in his case, including, perhaps, the one we are reading. Perhaps again, ‘The Lion-flee’, issuing from a mention in Pliny the Elder and looking nothing like a lion, is extinct because it grew tired of its existence; a suicidal tree that leads us to Granada’s ‘Court of the Lions’, whose complex, paradisal water system might contrast with the opening poem’s pool but instead contrasts two visits by the poet-speaker, fifty years apart, in a short, evocative poem whose final line has his older heart vibrate to the murmur of marble, the patter of water, a reference to Ibn Zamrak’s poem carved round the courtyard’s basin.

By the time we reach the final poem’s ‘untranslated last line of Paradiso’ we can consider ourselves widely travelled, in Europe at least, after a journey aided by myth (the Mersey’s foghorns lead out to Neptune’s harsh bassoon while a court yard in Milan is filled with Cerberus barking), and humour (Nero still playing Bach on his violin), history (the same poem’s scattered city rising from its ruins) and memory (I can see them all, as if they’d just I gathered in red and grey for morning roll call). All the recto single-page poems are accompanied by McKendrick’s accomplished verso artwork. The pictures offer an intriguing visual commentary on the poems but may equally be regarded quite separately, something McKendrick approves of.