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

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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. 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

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

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) 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). 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 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. French Symbolism’, The Cambridge History of French Literature, eds Burgwinkle, Hammond and Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)Gilles Ortlieb: Selected Poems, translated with Stephen Romer, Introduction by Sean O’Brien, Arc Publications, 2023

Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness - Penguin Books Australia

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. 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’. 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. Brilliant studies... energies by precisely noted details and exact language... a book alive with understated yearningBut 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. Language, Poetry and Rhetoric’, A Cultural History of Ideas in the Age of Empire, eds Johnson and Rosenfeld, Bloomsbury, 2022, pp. 135-162 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. Valloton and fin-de-siècle France, Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet, Royal Academy of Arts, 2019

Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness | Book review | The TLS

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. 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)

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T.E.Hulme: Selected Writings, Carcanet Press, 1998 (New Edition/American edition, Routledge USA, 2003) 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). Plastic Bertrand: Ca plane pour moi’, One-Hit Wonders: An Oblique History of Popular Music, ed Sarah Hill, Bloomsbury, 2022 Editor, with Emily McLaughlin, The Made and the Found: Poetry and Prose for Michael Sheringham, Legenda, 2017

Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness review - The Guardian

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." French language and modern literature; comparative literature; modern theatre; modern British and American poetry; translation and translation studies. Publications Il rumore che fanno le cose quando partono/The Noises Things Make When They Leave, trans. Giorgia Sensi, Sinopia, Venice, 2023This 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 The Ear’, Beneath the Skin: Writers on the Body (London: Profile Books/Wellcome Trust) and BBC Radio Three, 2018 Editor, Symbolism, Decadence and the fin de siècle: French and European Perspectives (University of Exeter Press, 2000)