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

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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. 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. 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 Mallarmé’s Tombeau d’Anatole’, in Situating Mallarmé, ed. Gordon Millan (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2001) This is a writer worth knowing… [McGuinness] combines elegant prose with caustic commentary on romance, education and crime… most people can write for a lifetime and not produce so perfect a sentence."

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Tracing ambiguities in a twilight haze will always be a ready pitfall for a work of this sort, but it is avoided here, and the poet achieves a rare, brittle clarity. 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.

The Dylan Thomas Collection

These poems seem to me a dance between substance and absence – the pursuit of ghosts, in all senses of the word: phantoms, shadows, the past, even ourselves. They deal in the insubstantial and the incorporeal, but also in those things that remain with us, elusively. This is 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 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. French language and modern literature; comparative literature; modern theatre; modern British and American poetry; translation and translation studies. Publications

Brutalist Britain: in conversation with Elain Harwood

Brilliant studies... energies by precisely noted details and exact language... a book alive with understated yearning Editor, Symbolism, Decadence and the fin de siècle: French and European Perspectives (University of Exeter Press, 2000) 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 McLaughlinThe final verse of ‘ Mother as Perfume’ gives a good impression of this effect, the lingering: ‘Scent is what’s caught as it goes, scent is the going: / the turn of the shoulder, the swing of the door, / the sillage, the vapour-trail, the dissolving wake; / the smoke of the candle is the shadow of its flame’.

Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness - nation.cymru Review: Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness - nation.cymru

Language, Poetry and Rhetoric’, A Cultural History of Ideas in the Age of Empire, eds Johnson and Rosenfeld, Bloomsbury, 2022, pp. 135-162 Plastic Bertrand: Ca plane pour moi’, One-Hit Wonders: An Oblique History of Popular Music, ed Sarah Hill, Bloomsbury, 2022 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. The Ear’, Beneath the Skin: Writers on the Body (London: Profile Books/Wellcome Trust) and BBC Radio Three, 2018

These examples may suggest a certain sombreness or melancholy, which could become tiresome, but these absence-laden poems, though tinged with longing, have a freshness about them. Maybe even a frisson, whereby the grey and fading things of the world suddenly reveal something beyond their taken-for-granted presence. 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.

Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness | Waterstones

Jorge Manrique, Stanzas for the Death of his Father, Shearsman Classics, 2021. Introduction by Geraldine Hazbun Editor, with Nathalie Aubert, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, From Art Nouveau to Surrealism: Belgian Modernity in the Making (Legenda, 2007) Il rumore che fanno le cose quando partono/The Noises Things Make When They Leave, trans. Giorgia Sensi, Sinopia, Venice, 2023 Gilles Ortlieb: Selected Poems, translated with Stephen Romer, Introduction by Sean O’Brien, Arc Publications, 2023

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Valloton and fin-de-siècle France, Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet, Royal Academy of Arts, 2019 Language and its limitations feature prominently in the poet’s reflections (‘When she spoke / her voice came from some far-off / dry-stone moorland where it echoed / across the acres razed inside her head’ ECT). 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) Specific details return, such as her accent (she spoke French: ‘The new accent is a brace, / doing its slow work on your mouth. / At night you take it out to let your tongue / go dreaming outside its cage’, ‘ New Accent). T.E.Hulme: Selected Writings, Carcanet Press, 1998 (New Edition/American edition, Routledge USA, 2003)