In a period when nations are retracting within their borders, the vivid and intricate poems of Jamie McKendrick’s new collection Anomaly are especially timely, and speak of a fragile legacy of openness and interconnectedness. The poems playfully twin Bologna and Bombay, the South Downs and the Camargue, the imagined and the actual. Often intensely visual, here more than ever, McKendrick’s poems engage with artists as various as the Taviani brothers, Sánchez Cotán, Bhupen Khakhar and Giacometti, and are as alive to the sea-bound cityscapes of Liverpool and Venice as to the rocky landscapes of Sardinia and Slovenia.