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The Years<br>Jamie McKendrick

Product description

Paperback, 36pp, illus
Arc, 2020

A chapbook of 15 beautifully-crafted poems. Each poem is accompanied by an illustration by the poet – ink and watercolour on paper, with occasional crayon and collage added. In part a response to the imposed isolation of last year, this chapbook combining poem and illustration was encouraged by a reacquaintance by the author of Hardy's drawings for Wessex Poems, which, says McKendrick, "share a consonant sensibility with the poems."

"As a rule," writes McKendrick in his foreword, "I've kept art work and poems at an unsocial distance, maintained only because one form seemed to interfere with the other. When (infrequently) I worked on, or played around with pictures, I didn't write poems, and vice versa. Of late I've felt inclined to unbuild the wall I'd constructed. After all, bad fences make good neighbours, as from childhood on I've had good reasons to believe.
"While making pictures to accompany the poems, several seemed to arrive quite naturally; others dug in their heels as if loathe to serve something other than themselves. Still, my hope is that image and poem can speak to each other without losing their autonomy."

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