- Paperback: 64 pages
- Publisher: Faber and Faber (20 Jan 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0571215327
- ISBN-13: 978-0571215324
- Product Dimensions: 19.3 x 12.4 x 0.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 383,700 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Ink Stone (Faber poetry)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"Acclaim for his previous collection, The Marble Fly (1997): 'Consistently excellent... where McKendrick scores is in his expert salvaging of beauty from squalor, wit from adversity, delicacy from grossness.' Michael Hofmann
Product Description
The best ink stones are slates from Chinese riverbeds, but in the long history of their use these have all been found. As one expert writes, 'the better the stone, the smaller and more consistent the particles will be and the denser the ink.' These new poems by Jamie McKendrick have a remarkable density of ink. They explore the grain, or 'tooth', of the natural world with unusual and discomforting detail at the same time as they chart the medium they work in - not only what the eye sees, but the eye itself: its structure and structurings. These poems open onto conflicting perspectives of home and abroad, the domestic and the wild, the natural and the uncanny, elegy and celebration.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bee's knees,
By A Customer
This review is from: Ink Stone (Faber poetry) (Paperback)
McKendrick is the least didactic of poets, and never tells you "what to think or not to think" as the weird review above complains. Ink Stone is an advance on his excellent last collection, The Marble Fly, winner of the Forward Prize, and mostly preserved in his selected, Sky Nails. The free-ish translations here (from Dante, Montale, Rilke and Lorca) are outstanding poems in their own right and echo the concerns and the language of the other poems in the book. These poems have the unsettling humour of his previous work but seem more at ease with strong emotion, and more direct and confident in their manner. Most powerful, in my view, are the several elegies to a close friend, but there are other poems such as 'Apotheosis' (one of several strange 'bee' poems), 'Good Hedges' and 'A Mole of Sorts' which are very original and show McKendrick as one of the foremost poets writing in England.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating Intellectual journey,
By A Customer
This review is from: Ink Stone (Faber poetry) (Paperback)
McKendrick's poems are always worth reading and that is true of this collection, but I don't think they quite come up to the standard of his previous cutting-edge work in, for instance, "Sky Nails" or "The Marble Fly". In some, I wasn't sure what was meant, although the sparse beauty of the languages is electrifying. The best poems are still the more personal ones, and I shall look forward, as ever, to his next publication.
1 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Bargains,
By A Customer
This review is from: Ink Stone (Faber poetry) (Paperback)
It is amazing the way McKendrick tells his readers what they should or should not think about the core of things. There is nothing there I can share. I have never heard of an odder combination of poems and translations than this one. The fact that the publisher is Faber tells us more about the state of poetry in this country than about the success of McKendrick's writing.
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