Description

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

‘This is McGuinness’s best collection by far, and stands out from the crowd’
SUNDAY TIMES

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.

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. ‘The Noises Things Make When They Leave’ elegises today’s post-industrial landscapes, their people and professions: sidelined by literature, bypassed by globalisation. The final sequence, ‘After the Flood’, links the book’s themes, seeking a way of seeing things for the first time and the last time simultaneously. 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 redeemed:

It’s 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.

A clear-sighted, intimate new poetry collection from the prizewinning author of Other People’s Countries and Throw me to the Wolves.

Publisher Review

Patrick McGuinness writes of the other country of childhood with Proustian elan and Nabokovian delight -- John Banville, author of THE SEA 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 -- Fiona Benson, author of EPHEMERON An extraordinary writer of great compassion -- Denise Mina, author of THE FIELD OF BLOOD The brilliance of Patrick McGuinness's writing has made his memories unforgettable to the reader -- Adam Foulds, author of THE QUICKENING MAZE