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

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Editor, with Emily McLaughlin, The Made and the Found: Poetry and Prose for Michael Sheringham, Legenda, 2017 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’. 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. 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 review - The Guardian Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness review - The Guardian

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. Edward Thomas: Poetry’s Tenses’, in Lucy Newlyn and Guy Cuthbertson, Branch Lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry (London: Enitharmon,2007) 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 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)The Ear’, Beneath the Skin: Writers on the Body (London: Profile Books/Wellcome Trust) and BBC Radio Three, 2018

Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness | Book review | The TLS

Plastic Bertrand: Ca plane pour moi’, One-Hit Wonders: An Oblique History of Popular Music, ed Sarah Hill, Bloomsbury, 2022

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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. 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’.