Journalists sometimes have to fight the temptation to use a beautiful but obscure word, knowing it will fall victim to an editor's delete key. Poets face no such constraints, explains Jamie McKendrick. "With a poem you have the liberty to use the exact word you want, and not just the liberty but the obligation. A poem should be where language is at its most active, where one word is being played against another. In journalism, the obligation is to be understood; in a poem, the obligation is to delight."

His poetry, which has won several awards, is by no means inaccessible. Indeed, his metaphors are often endearingly direct. In Darkness Tangible, for example, he likens his heart to "a small misshapen rucksack".

But his latest collection, Crocodiles & Obelisks, did send me to my dictionary on occasion, to return to the page with increased understanding and pleasure. Reading Hearthstone, a poem inspired by a fireplace, I had to look up both "telluric" (of or from the earth) and "frass", the sibilant sound evoking the trickle of dust it describes, making poetic what in plain prose is the excrement of a woodworm.

In Twain, the word "scute", from the Latin scutum (shield), refers to the panel on a turtle or tortoise's shell. McKendrick said he chose it because its hard quality embodies the impact of one of the collisions the poem describes, and contrasts strongly with the other, a motorcyclist's softer - but nonetheless fatal - collision with a bird.

Such juxtapositions of hard and soft matter appear in other poems. In The Experiment, which follows the dissection of an ox's eye, he writes of "the tiny wobbling world writ upside down" and the final image describes: "the pale lens, floating on light/like a discus/made from bone and cloud." Sometimes the apparent contrast is undone: in Ès el senyor Gaudí!, the Catalan architect lies on his deathbed, "his head a quarry of unfinished projects".

The changeability of objects made of seemingly invincible materials, such as stone, is a recurring theme in McKendrick's work, as is the transience of all human life. The collection's title refers to Italian and Russian slang terms for newspaper obituaries, the former being the insincere kind that shed "crocodile tears"; the latter the type that aggrandise the dead. "They're both signalling slightly different kinds of false memory," he said.

The book's epigraph: "l'ombra di un nome" means "the shadow of a name" and is from the poem Lapide (tombstone) by Giovanni Pascoli. "It's about memory and the memory of names. I wanted a name in almost every poem in the book. A name disrupts a line in a poem. It's obtrusive, bringing with it the associations of a person. I wanted to be obtruded on by history. Names cast a shadow, as a gravestone casts a shadow."

The history and culture of Spain and Italy are important influences on McKendrick's poetry. He worked at the University of Salerno, in southern Italy, for four years, and now translates Italian literature into English. His most recent translation is of the novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani (Penguin, 2007) and he is currently working on an edition of the poetry of Valerio Magrelli.

Reflecting on the challenges of translation, he says: "The difficulty of approaching a poem is that if it's not written in your mother tongue, you have to try harder. Your own language can be over-familiar. In a foreign language you may have to interrogate the surface a little more and work harder to understand what is happening."

McKendrick also teaches literature, creative writing, and translation for The Arvon Foundation and Oxford University's Department of Continuing Education, and writes articles about literature and art, as well as painting. Art and architecture form the subject of several poems in this collection, and works such as The Chilazon and Giotto are suffused with colour.

One artist whose work interests him is the Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky, who was a synaesthete, experiencing colours as sounds and vice versa. McKendrick said: "Synaethesia is of interest to poetry, though not necessarily the medical or actual condition. You are breaking a boundary between the portals of sense. It might not just be a confusion, but a way into the deeper order of things."

Born in Liverpool in 1955, McKendrick has lived in Oxford for many years and occasionally used the city as his subject. For example, the agave in the Botanic Garden greenhouse inspired The Century Plant in his previous collection The Marble Fly. He has written several poems about being flooded, based on personal experience.

With Tom Paulin and Bernard O'Donoghue, he will be reading his poetry at the Faber Poets event at the Oxford Literary Festival at 6.30pm on Wednesday, April 2. "I consider reading important and part of the work. When you make a poem you make it for the voice. Poems are not written just for the page, they are written for the air."

Crocodiles & Obelisks, by Jamie McKendrick, is published by Faber at £9.99. For details of the reading, see www. sundaytimes-oxfordliteraryfestival.co.uk