Blood Feather: ‘He writes with Proustian élan and Nabokovian delight’ John Banville

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Brilliant studies... energies by precisely noted details and exact language... a book alive with understated yearning The weaving of memory, landscapes and different times in these poems attests to the pervasive desolation of grief, and how it is in many senses a mode of being, more than a feeling. Valloton and fin-de-siècle France, Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet, Royal Academy of Arts, 2019 The first section of this volume of poetry lays the foundation that guides the rest. The poet pursues the memory of his mother, and captures in images the disjointedness and out-of-sync-ness that the dead leave in their wake.

Patrick McGuinness · Poem: ‘Landline’ · LRB 16 March 2023 Patrick McGuinness · Poem: ‘Landline’ · LRB 16 March 2023

Editor, with Nathalie Aubert, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, From Art Nouveau to Surrealism: Belgian Modernity in the Making (Legenda, 2007) It’s difficult – and useless – to impose a simple narrative on a collection of poems, particularly in this case. In lieu of a narrative, the images guide us. Grief is not the only theme here, but also the places that are like grief, which also tend to be those places haunted by something or someone. Lacunae of a sort.Language, Poetry and Rhetoric’, A Cultural History of Ideas in the Age of Empire, eds Johnson and Rosenfeld, Bloomsbury, 2022, pp. 135-162 A deeply moving book of poems... Shimmering with the "sweet dark syrup" of humour, and gorgeous sleights of imagery, these are poems of extraordinary grace; they come up for air with their cupped hands empty, yet brimming with light Fiona Benson, author of Ephemeron

Patrick McGuinness | Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages Patrick McGuinness | Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages

In Blood Feather, a book of doubling and displacement, we see time in a new way: the past, personal and collective, lingering as an ever-present ghost - while lost beyond recall. Off the Shelf Festival of Words is one of the North's largest literary festivals. Every October we bring the biggest names in local, regional, and international literary talent, media and the arts to Sheffield. But before my opening statement becomes a vague, catch-all appraisal of grief, which is the driving emotion of this volume, I must add that it is the precision with which these elusive things are pursued that sets these poems apart. Things blur into each other, and the effect of this volume is nocturnal, not in a necessarily dreamlike sense, but rather in the way that the familiar material of life appears slightly altered, its dimensions subtly changed, and time more elastic.

Plastic Bertrand: Ca plane pour moi’, One-Hit Wonders: An Oblique History of Popular Music, ed Sarah Hill, Bloomsbury, 2022 Paul de Roux Between Made and Found’ in The Made and the Found: Essays, Prose and Poetry in Honour of Michale Sheringham, eds McGuinness and McLaughlin Il rumore che fanno le cose quando partono/The Noises Things Make When They Leave, trans. Giorgia Sensi, Sinopia, Venice, 2023

Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness review - The Guardian Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness review - The Guardian

Gilles Ortlieb: Selected Poems, translated with Stephen Romer, Introduction by Sean O’Brien, Arc Publications, 2023

Editor, with Nathalie Aubert and Pierrre-Philippe Fraiture, La Belgique entre deux siècles: Laboratoire de la modernité, 1880-1914, Le Romantisme et après en France (Peter Lang, 2007) Editor, Symbolism, Decadence and the fin de siècle: French and European Perspectives (University of Exeter Press, 2000) It is a feat to write weight-bearing poems of such lightness. The balance, charm and wit of the writing are remarkable. Kate Kellaway, Observer In this intimate, confiding poetry collection, McGuinness shows how identity is layered, permeable, always in motion - how we are always actor and audience to ourselves