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Review: The Years, by Jamie McKendrick

ASLEF Journal, August 2021

The Years contains fifteen finely wrought poems with fifteen matching ink and watercolour images by McKendrick, who was born in Liverpool and has published seven collections with OUP and Faber & Faber over the last 30 years. He has, until now, kept his two artistic selves separate; but when they meet, here in this delicately formal hall of mirrors, each burnishes the other, and both the poems and the pictures shine a little brighter. This is Mersey Foghorns in its entirety:

On the stroke of twelve every New Year’s eve
the boats assembled in the estuary
let loose their growling hoot, the long drawn note
on Neptune’s harsh bassoon, into the dark

between us and the far shore of Port Sunlight,
cramming the black vault of heaven
with the Mersey’s immemorial miseries,
in one sweary jubilant answering-back.

You don’t have to have taken a ferry across the Mersey, or to have spent long in Liverpool, only to have a little knowledge about the history of that great city, and to have stood on the banks of the river, to admire that line about ‘the Mersey’s immemorial miseries’.

A life of doing nothing is a life
well-lived, is casting a shadow only where
other shadows live


‘Doing Nothing’