Jamie McKendrick’s ‘Nothing Doing’ is a sonnet coupled with an image by McKendrick himself, a mixed-media piece blending ink and watercolour with collage elements. This work serves as the opening poem in his pamphlet The Years, published by Arc in 2020 and the winner of the 2020 Michael Marks Illustration Award.
The poem recounts watching a heron stare into an outdoor swimming pool, with the second stanza turning inward to the speaker’s own state of mind, which the speaker sees reflected in the heron. The speaker notes the ‘sheer disgust’ with which the heron regards the lifeless water of the swimming pool: the sonnet’s octave end by describing the water as ‘So poor it might as well be air’. This sense of disillusionment is applied by the speaker to their general worldview in the following sestet: ‘The world is a con’ in which ‘nothing swims or glints or gazes back’ for the speaker.
In his foreword to the pamphlet, McKendrick notes that the writing of the poems – including his decision to ‘let image and word converse’ – was profoundly influenced by the seclusion of the Covid-19 lockdown period. The tone and setting of the poem reflect this period very strongly, with the speaker seeming to be full of restless energy that has no outlet in the frustration of lockdown.
The image that accompanies the poem seems at first viewing to simply illustrate the scene described in the poem. However, there are several distinctive stylistic features of the image that bear upon the reading of the poem. McKendrick mixes perspective and flat-plane drawing in his depiction of the scene, with the heron looming very large in the frame, and looking out of the picture directly at the viewer, further emphasising the connection McKendrick creates between subject and speaker in the poem.
The collage elements of the image appear to be taken from sudoku and word puzzles, suggestive of the idle time spent in lockdown conditions. These make up the buildings, ground and edge of the swimming pool, with the rigid straight lines of the grid mimicking the architectural lines, but also creating landscape literally built out of the uninspiring repetition that McKendrick’s speaker identifies in the poem.
The world that the speaker and the heron inhabit is one filled with ‘Water that looks like water but | isn’t’. The frustration and confusion that they share comes from not to being able to draw nourishment – food, for the heron, and inspiration, for the speaker – from their surroundings. This ‘looks like… but isn’t’ dilemma is emphasised in the image by the abstract, impressionistic rendering of the pool water as a series of simple wavy lines, contrasting the more detailed rendering of the heron, the only element of the scene with which the speaker is able to identify.
It is worth noting that the next poem in the collection is called ‘Doing Nothing’, the parallels in the titles suggesting a possible pairing between the two poems and their illustrations. I hope to return to this poem in the future to explore this connection.