The word 'foreign' has gathered hostile associations but its Latin root - foris: a door - is close to the spirit of these writings which explore openings and connections across and within artforms, eras, cultures and languages. McKendrick traces a series of dynamic, often unexpected refigurations of idea, image and structure from Gaius Valerius Catullus to Valerio Magrelli, from the French early Renaissance miniaturist Jean Bourdichon to the contemporary Belgian painter Luc Tuymans. Various kinds of translation and traversal are central to these essays which consider art and poetry from Italy, France, Germany, Russia as well as Ireland, Britain and the U.S. Other topics include Titian's debt to Ovid and Catullus, Dante seen through translation and through Botticelli's illustrations, Michelangelo as poet, Blake as painter, the use of Plutarch by Shakespeare and Cavafy, the strange convergences between Whitman and Baudelaire, and Elizabeth Bishop, as both poet and painter, as well as her Baudelairean correspondences.

Jamie McKendrick is distinguished both as a poet and translator, and is a Cavaliere dell'Ordine della Stella della Solidarietà Italiana. His seven collections have won the Forward Prize, the Hawthornden Prize and, in 2019, the Cholmondeley Award, and his Selected Poems are published by Faber. As a translator he has won the Oxford Weidenfeld Prize and the John Florio Prize (twice), and he is the editor of the Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poems.