A debut packed full of surprises, from thoughtful mental health odes that elude closure, to poems surfing the lingos of the infotainment industries, to hilarious psychogeographical excursions through the tarnished oasis of Crystal Palace Park.

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

From the neuroses of J Alfred Prufrock to the smoky London of The Waste Land, the whimsical delight of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats to the dazzling metaphysical fireworks of The Four Quartets, you’ll discover new worlds of wit and wisdom, and understand why Eliot is recognised as one of the greatest masters in the history of the English language. In Mother As Hostage, about later days: “it’s hard to hear because she holds her face / too far from the receiver. The Noises Things Make When They Leave' elegises today's post-industrial landscapes, their people and sidelined by literature, bypassed by globalisation.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. He is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford and Honorary Professor at Sheffield Hallam University. Formally inventive, rich in aslant borrowings, unafraid of visual and textual experiment, it is an exhilarating debut. Language, Poetry and Rhetoric’, A Cultural History of Ideas in the Age of Empire, eds Johnson and Rosenfeld, Bloomsbury, 2022, pp. Things and people come and go, leave a trace – a noise and an outline, and eventually silence, their tracks worn away.

Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness | Book review | The TLS

Born in Tunisia in 1968 to a Belgian French-speaking mother and an English father of Irish descent, he grew up in Belgium and also lived for periods in Venezuela, Iran, Romania and the UK. They deal in the insubstantial and the incorporeal, but also in those things that remain with us, elusively. He currently lives in Oxford and in Wales teaching French and Comparative Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford. 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.Sure Things deftly explains there is no such thing as “sure” and, like the jetty that turns out not to exist, he feels unable to hang on to his own words. 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.

Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness | Waterstones

Symbolism and the Via Negativa of Theatre’, in Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the Modern Stage, ed. Exploring the gaps between languages and between our selves in language, Patrick McGuinness dreams of a new tense in which the world's losses are the anniversary of my mother's death,and it's my mother's birthday -the day she short-circuited the tenses,made the current flow both ways. The Noises Things Make When They Leave' elegises today's post-industrial landscapes, their people and professions: sidelined by literature, bypassed by globalisation.In Factory for Sad Thoughts, a prose piece, he playfully proposes: “Of all the poems I’ve ever written, this is the one I didn’t. He examines new identities forged by bilingualism and pays homage to his mother – herself displaced between languages. This is poetry with real ambition that wants to hug us – it’s big, it’s queer and, like paprika, you can never have enough of it.

Blood Feather - Off The Shelf Blood Feather - Off The Shelf

It’s difficult – and useless – to impose a simple narrative on a collection of poems, particularly in this case. The past for McGuinness is an irretrievable terrain, inhabiting the everyday with its ghostly present-absence, which in moments we are able to enter again as a tourist. Following the rituals, poems emerge: “we kill 3000 silkworms / to make one / pound / of silk / refrigerators / are where / we keep our bodies / before they become / our bodies. 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). Patrick McGuinness is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Anne's College.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). Over 254 pages, Hill creates a new kind of narrative poem, which has all the rewards of reading a good novel – or novels – yet she retains poetry’s unique ability to zoom in on minutiae, as when contemplating ants whizzing about like bumper cars: “maybe they are thinking Oh my God, / I’ll never find true love / before it’s over, / before some robin stabs me to death”. 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.