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

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The city’s relationship to the railway, like its relationship to the world, is arrogant but insecure, high-minded but petty. Out of this engagement with the past, a kind of aesthetic emerges – the “method” and “path” of the title – based on the idea that the body inhabits and exists through space, as the poet here inhabits and exists through and between other voices. Things and people come and go, leave a trace – a noise and an outline, and eventually silence, their tracks worn away.

Polly Barton in conversation with Hannah Trevarthe - Eventbrite

With award-winning novelist and critic Patrick McGuinness as your guide, you’ll uncover the riches of human experience lying in wait in the greatest poetry of the 20th century. The Noises Things Make When They Leave' elegises today's post-industrial landscapes, their people and professions: sidelined by literature, bypassed by globalisation.

We at Penguin Random House Australia acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the Traditional Custodians and the first storytellers of the lands on which we live and work. The poet pursues the memory of his mother, and captures in images the disjointedness and out-of-sync-ness that the dead leave in their wake. 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 | Book review | The TLS

In the Englishman’s Home, McGuinness’s arresting opener, plays on the unspoken phrase “an Englishman’s home is his castle” to bring out the feeling of entrapment experienced by the arriving French speaker: “Little castles of milk teeth, / lined up to guard the helpless tongue – / … / it’s where you kept the language you arrived with. French language and modern literature; comparative literature; modern theatre; modern British and American poetry; translation and translation studies.He has written three collections of poetry, most recently Blood Feather, and has written and edited a number of scholarly books on French and Francophone literature. Language and its limitations feature prominently in the poet’s reflections (‘When she spoke / her voice came from some far-off / dry-stone moorland where it echoed / across the acres razed inside her head’ ECT). They are a way of never getting to the point’, ‘ Travelodge’), old cooling towers (‘they had the permanence / of grey things: seen but rarely noticed; / or, if noticed, only once’, ‘ The Cooling Towers of Didcot’), the ‘ghost stations’ of the Brussels metro (‘but still the trains pass through it, run it through, / reminding us how quickly these days we produce Oblivion, / how fast we waste, how obsolescence more and more / comes neck and neck with that it obsolesces / and soon may come before it. Landline describes clearing his mother’s house after her death (his turn to tidy) and notes: “the polished square where the phone had sat”.