Book details

Crocodiles and obelisks are ancient symbols of empire. The poems in Jamie McKendrick's astonishing new 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 for newspaper obituaries - for tributes which either monumentalize the dead or shed false tears for them. Crocodiles & Obelisks is McKendrick's most individual work to date, and experiments with different ways of remembering, offering conclusions that are both cunning and drôle.

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.