on Jamie McKendrick

Riveted

I remember the moment I was first riveted by a McKendrick poem, one winter morning flicking through the London Review of Books: ‘We that have been hunting all the day / are mighty tired, our hair is dank with sweat / and by our hunting helmets plastered flat’. That poem, which rolls on magnificently, calls to the reader from a misty, historical world very unlike ours, while carrying in its voice great and deep emotion, an emotion that is still ours to access and one which, in our better moments, we do access. I was riveted, as I say. By ‘riveted’, I mean to mark out the experience of being struck by a poem as if by a thunderbolt, not understanding how it does what it does and wanting to understand.

Chronicler of contemporary British life Lamorna Ash writes, ‘What I do not understand I have always been drawn towards’ (Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, Bloomsbury). Aristotle observed a similar phenomenon: ‘It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters too, e.g. about the changes of the moon and of the sun, about the stars and about the origin of the universe’ (Metaphysics). It is that which remains at least somewhat elusive to our faculty of understanding that draws us in. Quite a lot of artworks are relatively boring (i.e. not wonder-inducing), once one is an adult with some degree of specialization in the relevant medium, because they are encompassed by ...