The Canals of Mars
Patrick McGuinness' latest collection of poetry, The Canals Of Mars is as remarkable a work of poetic craftmanship as has appeared in a Welsh context for some time. In a meticilous and yet bouyant idiom, the book takes us on a journey of places - Romania, Glasgow, the Welsh lexicon, Mars and Coney Beach - the essence of which the poet vividly records. In No we read: 'King Billy and Princess Di rule their dystopia of Rangers clubs and chip shops'. In Belgitude, an 'unmistakeable confusion about what it was' is the hallmark of a country where 'after a while I fitted in by looking out of place'. In A View of Pasadena from the Road there is 'hyperbole, free-market capitalese...so much to see, so little that holds attention'. Worthier of attention in a fragmented world are images 'taken from life's seams, life's secret pocket, its false-bottomed case: the things we look at but don't think to see' (Two Paintings by Thomas Jones). McGuinness builds on these minutiae, 'life's tiny intimations' (Short Life of a Thought), hoping in his studied work that'a word might cross the unfenced border of its meaning' (Borders), as is the case perhaps in a phrase from Coney Beach: 'Time passes through them [the men] like rope through a knot' or in Surfers in a Wing mirror: 'driving past we watch them disappear, distorted in the wingmirror's mannered version of themselves'. Major poems in this collection - in the sense that they deal successfully with the difficult ideas of doing, being and becoming - are A History of Doing Nothing and The Darkroom. In the former, the 'doers of nothing...Like us...folded back into Time's pleats before going, traceless, where the dead go, soft-footed in the unresisting dark'. Their destination is perhaps The White Place, a poem about ceasing or continuing to be. On delicate subjects such as this, the poet writes with characteristic deftness: 'I think that we are not alone. I think it less for your sake now than for my own'.
Cyfnewidfa Lên Cymru/Wales Literature Exchange