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This is the second major collection by Patrick McGuinness (following The Canals of Mars), and includes poems from his prize-winning pamphlet 19th Century Blues. A distinguished translator and professor of French, McGuinness has also written about recent Romanian history, and some of the most poignant and witty poems in this collection are translations of work by the Romanian Liviu Campanu.
Patrick McGuinness is half Belgian, and the second part of this collection, ‘The Blue Guide’, is a series of poems on railway stations between Brussels and Luxembourg – to him both the local line of childhood holidays and a link with the wider world and the past. The poems are quirky, nostalgic – a sort of philosophical ‘Slow Train’ – but by no means always affectionate. The dry humour and fondness for playing with two languages is encapsulated in ‘Libramont’.
In ‘French’, his relationship with his mother’s language is ‘freighted/with a kind of loss; hers, mine’; it is like a ‘house that stayed unused/nine months out of twelve’, despite his evident fluency in it professionally. Indeed it is this sense of never quite belonging to either world that he celebrates in his witty ‘Article 0.5’ ( his contribution to the ‘European Constitution in Verse’, satirising the failure of the actual one), which asserts ‘the right to alienation’. A similarly teasing, haunting poem, ‘The Shape of Nothing Happening’, sees ‘matter worrying away/at trying not to be, and being all the while’.
There is a short group of poems, ‘The Thaw’, based on the Belgian poet Dotremont, which has some striking visual imagery. Several other poems refer to other artists but there are also poems of great personal emotion, such as ‘House Clearance’ and ‘Lists’, and some beautiful lines on his dead mother.
The final section, poems by Campanu (who was banished, like Ovid, to Constanta), chronicle his exile and frustration with self-mocking grace and pathos. Several are addressed to a lover, including ‘In the Natural History Museum’, which recalls the lovers’ stolen moments under the constraints of the 1984-like regime where ‘nothing changes [...] except the past’.
McGuinness is an interesting and affecting poet in his own right. In this collection, he also displays his talent for translation, making other poets' work accessible to English readers and rendering it with wit and sympathy.
Caroline Clark
It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.
Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.
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