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

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He is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford and Honorary Professor at Sheffield Hallam University. 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. Formally inventive, rich in aslant borrowings, unafraid of visual and textual experiment, it is an exhilarating debut. Patrick McGuinness is a poet, novelist, translator and academic, and professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of St Anne’s College. Oxford’s crest – an ox ‘fording’ three wavy lines of water – was a reality before it became a symbol.

Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness review - The Guardian Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness review - The Guardian

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. 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.

Landline describes clearing his mother’s house after her death (his turn to tidy) and notes: “the polished square where the phone had sat”. At the Back of the Painting is a dark liberation that describes what one envisages as a troubled Vermeer.

Patrick McGuinness · Poem: ‘Landline’ · LRB 16 March 2023 Patrick McGuinness · Poem: ‘Landline’ · LRB 16 March 2023

The past for McGuinness is an irretrievable terrain, inhabiting the everyday with its ghostly present-absence, which in moments we are able to enter again as a tourist. And in the long elegy for his dying father, Up Late, winner of the 2022 Forward prize for best single poem, the voice emerges with a lean and stripped-back clarity, using words and metaphors not to decorate or to defamiliarise, but simply to think with. The collection brims with reverie and there are gripping poems about subjects not expecting attention: trains through Belgium, postindustrial landscapes and pigeons – the feral and the tame who live “show home lives” and “gentrify the air”. Places such as old factory towns (‘In the slackened tether of its moorings / the place we thought we lived in emigrated, and it was we who stayed behind /… / We didn’t know how thinly it all hung, / how quickly gone; / or how the edge was always near; / now that the edge is here’, ‘ Factory Town’), Travelodges (‘You wonder who designs these places.A debut packed full of surprises, from thoughtful mental health odes that elude closure, to poems surfing the lingos of the infotainment industries, to hilarious psychogeographical excursions through the tarnished oasis of Crystal Palace Park. Laird’s fifth collection glimmers with angsty maturity as it manoeuvres its way between introspection and elegy. Patrick McGuinness is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Anne's College. He was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2011, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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The Noises Things Make When They Leave' elegises today's post-industrial landscapes, their people and sidelined by literature, bypassed by globalisation.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’. In Factory for Sad Thoughts, he describes dreaming that he cannot read his dying mother’s lips: “I’m not even sure they are words and in what language”.