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

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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. Mallarmé’s Tombeau d’Anatole’, in Situating Mallarmé, ed. Gordon Millan (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2001)

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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. Language, Poetry and Rhetoric’, A Cultural History of Ideas in the Age of Empire, eds Johnson and Rosenfeld, Bloomsbury, 2022, pp. 135-162 The Ear’, Beneath the Skin: Writers on the Body (London: Profile Books/Wellcome Trust) and BBC Radio Three, 2018 In this intimate, confiding poetry collection, McGuinness shows how identity is layered, permeable, always in motion - how we are always actor and audience to ourselvesFrench Symbolism’, The Cambridge History of French Literature, eds Burgwinkle, Hammond and Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Il rumore che fanno le cose quando partono/The Noises Things Make When They Leave, trans. Giorgia Sensi, Sinopia, Venice, 2023 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. 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 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

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

T.E.Hulme: Selected Writings, Carcanet Press, 1998 (New Edition/American edition, Routledge USA, 2003) The 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’.French language and modern literature; comparative literature; modern theatre; modern British and American poetry; translation and translation studies. Publications The image that gives the volume its title and is itself the title of one of the poems – ‘ Blood Feather’ – seems to contain a guiding principle: a pigeon hits a window, makes a sound, presumably causes some commotion, or maybe simply slips away again, and leaves ‘a ghost against the glass’ which remains, for now, until ‘the next rain against the window’.

Blood Feather - Penguin Books UK

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. Editor, Symbolism, Decadence and the fin de siècle: French and European Perspectives (University of Exeter Press, 2000) Valloton and fin-de-siècle France, Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet, Royal Academy of Arts, 2019 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) Edward Thomas: Poetry’s Tenses’, in Lucy Newlyn and Guy Cuthbertson, Branch Lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry (London: Enitharmon,2007)Editor, with Nathalie Aubert, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, From Art Nouveau to Surrealism: Belgian Modernity in the Making (Legenda, 2007)