Crocodiles & Obelisks

(Paperback, Main)

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Crocodiles and obelisks are ancient symbols of empire. The poems in this collection sift the debris of power and range from Mussolini's Italy and Franco's Spain to the Belgian Congo and to the Roman, the Austro-Hungarian and British empires. But 'crocodiles' and 'obelisks' are also terms used, in Italy and Russia respectively, for newspaper obituaries - for tributes which either monumentalize the dead or shed false tears for them. Jamie McKendrick's astonishing new collection experiments with and explores different ways of remembering.


These poems examine the legacies of a cast of unreconciled and ghostly presences: Ibn al-Haitham, a 10th-century physicist from Basra, the medieval king Alfonso the Wise, Sir Roger Casement (the Irish patriot and activist), the artists Joseph Albers and Hannah Hoch, as well as Gaudi and Piranesi. Several poems are set in prisons, infamous historic sites which evoke the extraordinary renditions of the present.


The lessons of these new poems are cunning, droll, laconically exact. They directly challenge Philip Larkin's proposition that poetry is concerned with the self, whereas the novel is concerned with others. This collection is a canvas crowded with other people, and yet is Jamie McKendrick's most individual work to date.

Author Bio

Jamie McKendrick was born in Liverpool in 1955. He taught at the University of Salerno in Italy and is the author of four collections of poetry: The Sirocco Room (1991); The Kiosk on the Brink (1993); The Marble Fly (1997), winner of the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and a Poetry Book Society Choice; and Ink Stone (2003), which was shortlisted for the 2003 T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Award. He is editor of the 20th-Century Italian Poems (2004), and his translation of the poetry of Valerio Magrelli will be published by Faber next year. Jamie McKendrick lives in Oxford.