Gifts of the Magi is a new collection of six poems by Jamie McKendrick.

Born in Liverpool, Jamie is a poet and translator based in Oxford. He has published seven collections of poetry and two Selected Poems with Faber & Faber. His poetry has won numerous awards including the Forward Poetry Prize for The Marble Fly, the Hawthornden Prize for Out There and the Cholmondeley Award, and his books have been nominated for the Whitbread Award and twice for the T. S. Eliot prize and the Forward Prize.  His translations include the six books of Giorgio Bassani’s The Novel of Ferrara, a verse play by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and selections from the poetry of Valerio Magrelli (winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize and the John Florio Prize) and of Antonella Anedda (which also won the John Florio Prize).  His self-illustrated pamphlet The Years won the Michael Marks Illustration Award and his writings on art and poetry have been published as The Foreign Connection. This is our second collaboration, following the tri-lingual chapbook, The Hunters, in 2015.

Jamie’s poetry pays minute attention to the details of the natural world and of human history, mixing formal pleasure with a disquieting humour.  This new collection plays with traditional ideas concerning wise men and rich gifts – the price of wisdom and the ambiguity of gifts, for both the giver and receiver.  Myrrh, the gift brought by Balthazar, for example, is associated in the Bible both with the anointing of kings and with death. The poems delve into the contemporary – as in a lockdown binge-watched TV series about Australian gold-diggers – as well as the biblical and the classical. Smyrna, present day Izmir, an ancient source of myrrh and here the site of another gift, is reputed by some to be the birthplace of Homer, and the sequence ends with a violent episode from Virgil’s Aeneid about the hapless Polydorus turned into a myrtle bush.

The numbered edition is signed by the author.  It is hand composed with Alcuin Baskerville type, and titling in Rudolf Koch’s Locarno italic.  It is printed on some of the last Zerkall paper, and covered in a gold and paste paper designed and made by us for this book.  The edition is of 130 hard back books bound in our workshop, with 15 further sets available for binders.  17x24.5cm