Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Sky Nails is a selection of poems from the three collections Jamie McKendrick has so far published and it affords the reader a useful opportunity to trace the development and estimate the achievement of this highly praised poet whose last book, The Marble Fly, was both a Poetry Book Society Choice and the winner of the 1997 Forward Prize for Best Collection.

     Some of the poems in the first section of Sky Nails strongly suggest the influence of Hopkins. Take these lines from ‘Frail Weave’ for instance:

But now the whole heath spreads
violet, salt-kissed, tightly curled
on its bed of peat where the ling and the bell
and the cross-leaved heather cling
in dusky mounds to the earth that holds
on an edge, the dearer for its vanishing.

     There we have something of Hopkin’s “...roll, the rise, the carol, the creation” and elsewhere McKendrick seems perhaps to share a little of Tom Paulin’s preoccupation with odd, gritty, mainly monosyllabic words as in ‘Earthquake’, one of a sequence of irregular sonnets under the rubric ‘Mountain’:

Inside the mountain earth begins to move
its joints and springs the links that pegged
                                                       it down
- the fans of schist, the chocks and wedges of

feldspar and chert...

I confess that this had me reaching for the dictionary to discover that ‘schist’ and ‘chert’ are geological terms which work felicitously in this context.

     McKendrick is a stylish, almost dandified writer and, at his best, produces poems of considerable wit and lyrical sonority. There is a tendency shown in a few of the poems in the middle section - in ‘The Master Stroke’ for instance, - to embrace a kind of Ashbery-like indeterminacy and elusiveness when far too much information is withheld from the reader but most of the later poems are mercifully free from this.

     I particularly like, towards the end of Sky Nails, ‘Name Tag’, ‘Gainful Employment’, and ‘Aphrodisiacs’ which gives a new slant on the term ‘confessional poetry’.