A first collection with conviction and authority, Strange Land gathers poems of love and of the natural world, elegies and satires, poems of childhood and parenthood, verses of the familiar and the exotic, apocalyptic and meditative. Kendall resists settling for the comfort of a single voice: in their formal variousness his poems evoke lives that are questing and contradictory, antic and mundane. The history of the last century cannot be evaded-- poems are haunted by the Second World War and its legacy, by Einstein, by the space race and the transformative discoveries of Hubble "I sing the time being, I sing/the getting there, not knowing where to get/and whether I should not not care/as rumours of progress dwindle to farce."