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

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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. Edward Thomas: Poetry’s Tenses’, in Lucy Newlyn and Guy Cuthbertson, Branch Lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry (London: Enitharmon,2007) 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." 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. He takes his place among those singers and painters of the haunted, the melancholy, the diminished, the caricatural, the humdrum’ – Michael Hofmann

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

It is a feat to write weight-bearing poems of such lightness. The balance, charm and wit of the writing are remarkable. Kate Kellaway, ObserverValloton and fin-de-siècle France, Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet, Royal Academy of Arts, 2019

Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness - Penguin Books New Zealand Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness - Penguin Books New Zealand

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.

Gilles Ortlieb: Selected Poems, translated with Stephen Romer, Introduction by Sean O’Brien, Arc Publications, 2023 T.E.Hulme: Selected Writings, Carcanet Press, 1998 (New Edition/American edition, Routledge USA, 2003) 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.

Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness | Goodreads

French language and modern literature; comparative literature; modern theatre; modern British and American poetry; translation and translation studies. Publications Editor, Symbolism, Decadence and the fin de siècle: French and European Perspectives (University of Exeter Press, 2000) 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. The Ear’, Beneath the Skin: Writers on the Body (London: Profile Books/Wellcome Trust) and BBC Radio Three, 2018French Symbolism’, The Cambridge History of French Literature, eds Burgwinkle, Hammond and Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)