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

Patrick McGuinness - Penguin Books UK Patrick McGuinness - Penguin Books UK

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 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 Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference. He takes his place among those singers and painters of the haunted, the melancholy, the diminished, the caricatural, the humdrum’ – Michael Hofmann Brilliant studies... energies by precisely noted details and exact language... a book alive with understated yearning

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 Professor Charles Mundye is Head of the Department of Culture and Media at Sheffield Hallam University Gilles Ortlieb: Selected Poems, translated with Stephen Romer, Introduction by Sean O’Brien, Arc Publications, 2023 French Symbolism’, The Cambridge History of French Literature, eds Burgwinkle, Hammond and Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Plastic Bertrand: Ca plane pour moi’, One-Hit Wonders: An Oblique History of Popular Music, ed Sarah Hill, Bloomsbury, 2022

Brutalist Britain: in conversation with Elain Harwood

Il rumore che fanno le cose quando partono/The Noises Things Make When They Leave, trans. Giorgia Sensi, Sinopia, Venice, 2023 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. Valloton and fin-de-siècle France, Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet, Royal Academy of Arts, 2019 Edward Thomas: Poetry’s Tenses’, in Lucy Newlyn and Guy Cuthbertson, Branch Lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry (London: Enitharmon,2007)T.E.Hulme: Selected Writings, Carcanet Press, 1998 (New Edition/American edition, Routledge USA, 2003) 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. Jorge Manrique, Stanzas for the Death of his Father, Shearsman Classics, 2021. Introduction by Geraldine Hazbun 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). 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).

Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness | Goodreads

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 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)What's stopping us telling the stories of women's inner lives, or listening to them, especially once they become mothers, or are over forty? Actresses discover there are far fewer roles once they're no longer seen as young; whilst middle-aged and older women's lives are conflated, as if they are having exactly the same experiences. 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. Language, Poetry and Rhetoric’, A Cultural History of Ideas in the Age of Empire, eds Johnson and Rosenfeld, Bloomsbury, 2022, pp. 135-162