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

Product Information

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

Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness | Waterstones

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’. Gilles Ortlieb: Selected Poems, translated with Stephen Romer, Introduction by Sean O’Brien, Arc Publications, 2023 These poems seem to me a dance between substance and absence – the pursuit of ghosts, in all senses of the word: phantoms, shadows, the past, even ourselves. They deal in the insubstantial and the incorporeal, but also in those things that remain with us, elusively.Language, Poetry and Rhetoric’, A Cultural History of Ideas in the Age of Empire, eds Johnson and Rosenfeld, Bloomsbury, 2022, pp. 135-162

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

T.E.Hulme: Selected Writings, Carcanet Press, 1998 (New Edition/American edition, Routledge USA, 2003) Jorge Manrique, Stanzas for the Death of his Father, Shearsman Classics, 2021. Introduction by Geraldine Hazbun 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 lightValloton and fin-de-siècle France, Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet, Royal Academy of Arts, 2019 Il rumore che fanno le cose quando partono/The Noises Things Make When They Leave, trans. Giorgia Sensi, Sinopia, Venice, 2023 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.

Blood Feather - Penguin Books UK Blood Feather - Penguin Books UK

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. Editor, with Emily McLaughlin, The Made and the Found: Poetry and Prose for Michael Sheringham, Legenda, 2017 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.

Last on

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