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

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Patrick is the author of three poetry collections, two novels and a non-fiction book about place, time and memory. At the centre of the collection nests another collection, attributed to the invented song collector AE Pious, of lost Irish drinking jigs: “If living is dying, / If singing is sighing, / If kicking pricks is tricky, / Try living in Kilnicky! Things and people come and go, leave a trace – a noise and an outline, and eventually silence, their tracks worn away. For everyone counting out the days of the pandemic in coffee spoons, wandering aimlessly through half-deserted streets, frustrated by a hundred indecisions: T. Eliot is famous for his brilliance, sophistication and complexity, and no less infamous for his refusal to make concessions to the casual reader; but making sense of the legendary poet does not have to be a chore.

Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness | Goodreads

When you login first time using a Social Login button, we collect your account public profile information shared by Social Login provider, based on your privacy settings. At the Back of the Painting is a dark liberation that describes what one envisages as a troubled Vermeer. The illuminating dérives of the finale, After the Flood, explore this further with in-situ jottings of journeys through mothballed Belgian stations, reminding us that the best poetry is often that which never makes it from the notebook. The balance, charm and wit of the writing are remarkable, not least because of his mother’s disequilibrium (there are poems that sensitively allude to psychiatric hospital and to her undergoing ECT). Emerging from the queer visionary tradition of Whitman and Ginsberg, the cornerstone of CAConrad’s practice is a series of rituals and instructions which their readers are invited to share in: “Sit outside under shelter of a doorway … where you can easily touch, smell, taste, FEEL the storm.

His memoir Other People’s Countries won the Duff Cooper Prize, and his second novel, Throw Me to the Wolves, won the Encore Award. 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’. The miniaturism of Martial and Emily Dickinson is reinvented in this iridescent collection which brings together 11 sequences whose subjects range from girls misbehaving in convent schools to fridges contemplating death, plus a pair of bad-tempered sisters, a parrot and hair clips: “What I hated most were the clips / that lived and died in hundreds in her hair, / cascades of coloured clips with floral legs / incapable of understanding anything. Places such as old factory towns (‘In the slackened tether of its moorings / the place we thought we lived in emigrated, and it was we who stayed behind /… / We didn’t know how thinly it all hung, / how quickly gone; / or how the edge was always near; / now that the edge is here’, ‘ Factory Town’), Travelodges (‘You wonder who designs these places.

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

In Mother As Bird, he compares her to a sparrow that loses itself in the host: “She left in her hundreds, left me alone in her thousands, / and when her wings opened they closed the sky. Every October we bring the biggest names in local, regional, and international literary talent, media and the arts to Sheffield. In Uwe Johnson’s work, perspective doesn’t come from a bird’s-eye view but from staying at eye level – from looking and never stopping. Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference.The poem, and the volume as a whole, charts the emergence of a new voice which is at once warm and edgy. Language, Poetry and Rhetoric’, A Cultural History of Ideas in the Age of Empire, eds Johnson and Rosenfeld, Bloomsbury, 2022, pp. His other books include two collections of poems, The Canals of Mars (2004), and Jilted City (2010), and a memoir, Other People's Countries (2015), which won the Duff Cooper Prize. We honour Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' continuous connection to Country, waters, skies and communities. French language and modern literature; comparative literature; modern theatre; modern British and American poetry; translation and translation studies.

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

The first section, 'Squeeze the Day' - a series of deeply moving poems about the author's mother, displaced between languages - investigates her illness and death; how being bilingual is like having a double, a second self; how each self haunts the other. Formally inventive, rich in aslant borrowings, unafraid of visual and textual experiment, it is an exhilarating debut.The poems themselves seem slightly surprised by their existence, as if given half a chance, they might remove themselves from the page. He currently lives in Oxford and in Wales teaching French and Comparative Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford. Maybe even a frisson, whereby the grey and fading things of the world suddenly reveal something beyond their taken-for-granted presence. He has written three collections of poetry, most recently Blood Feather, and has written and edited a number of scholarly books on French and Francophone literature.