The poetry pamphlet, which may be anything from a folded sheet to thirty-six pages (the upper limit for entry into the Michael Marks Poetry Award), serves useful functions as a platform for new voices and a way station for old hands. It may also be valuable as a distinct curated space at times superior to that of the customary full-length poetry book.

Jamie McKendrick’s The Years (shortlisted for this year’s prize; Arc, £8) is a case in point. The poems are, in themselves, fine examples of McKendrick’s unshowy yet impressive formal accomplishment, erudition and thematic range: there are sonnets on “Doing Nothing” and “Nothing Doing”; there is disquisition on “The Lion Tree” in Pliny, recollection of fellow pupils from schooldays or “Mersey Foghorns” at New year; there is Dante-tinged elegy. Beside each of them is an ink and watercolour image, also by McKendrick, in equivalent muted tones. The pictures are sometimes representative, sometimes more abstract, and sometimes contain elements of collage. One side of the spread may illustrate or comment on the other directly; the relationship between the two may be slightly more oblique. The coming together of McKendrick’s two creative sides is particularly well suited to the contemplation of multiple McKendricks: to write a poem imagining meeting up for a drink with your younger self (TLS, November 6, 2020) is a reflective act; to situate that poem opposite a picture, painted by yourself, of that same meeting is to erect a low-lit hall of mirrors.