Blood Feather
  • Published: 4 June 2023
  • ISBN: 9780224098311
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 80
  • RRP: $32.99
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Blood Feather

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

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In this intimate, confiding poetry collection, Patrick McGuinness shows how identity is layered, permeable, always in motion - how we are always actor and audience to ourselves

In this intimate, confiding poetry collection, McGuinness shows how identity is layered, permeable, always in motion - how we are always actor and audience to ourselves

'This is McGuinness's best collection by far, and stands out from the crowd'
SUNDAY TIMES

In Blood Feather, a book of doubling and displacement, we see time in a new way: the past, personal and collective, lingering as an ever-present ghost - while lost beyond recall.

The first section, 'Squeeze the Day' - a series of deeply moving poems about the author's mother, displaced between languages - investigates her illness and death; how being bilingual is like having a double, a second self; how each self haunts the other. 'The Noises Things Make When They Leave' elegises today's post-industrial landscapes, their people and professions: sidelined by literature, bypassed by globalisation. The final sequence, 'After the Flood', links the book's themes, seeking a way of seeing things for the first time and the last time simultaneously. Exploring the gaps between languages and between our selves in language, Patrick McGuinness dreams of a new tense in which the world's losses are redeemed:

It's the anniversary of my mother's death,
and it's my mother's birthday -
the day she short-circuited the tenses,
made the current flow both ways.

A clear-sighted, intimate new poetry collection from the prizewinning author of Other People's Countries and Throw me to the Wolves.
  • Published: 4 June 2023
  • ISBN: 9780224098311
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 80
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Patrick McGuinness

Patrick McGuinness is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Anne's College. Born in Tunisia and raised in Belgium, he is a poet, novelist and translator. His novel The Last Hundred Days was longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the 2011 Costa First Novel Award, and his second novel, Throw me to the Wolves, won the 2020 Encore Award. His other books include two collections of poems, The Canals of Mars (2004), and Jilted City (2010), and a memoir, Other People's Countries (2015), which won the Duff Cooper Prize. He was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2011, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Also by Patrick McGuinness

Throw Me to the Wolves
Other People's Countries
See all

Praise for Blood Feather

A deeply moving book of poems... Shimmering with the "sweet dark syrup" of humour, and gorgeous sleights of imagery, these are poems of extraordinary grace; they come up for air with their cupped hands empty, yet brimming with light

Fiona Benson, author of Ephemeron

Patrick McGuinness writes of the other country of childhood with Proustian élan and Nabokovian delight

John Banville, author of The Sea

The brilliance of Patrick McGuinness's writing has made his memories unforgettable to the reader

Adam Foulds, author of The Quickening Maze

An extraordinary writer of great compassion

Denise Mina, author of The Field of Blood

Arresting... Reminds us that the best poetry is often that which never makes it from the notebook

Guardian

Brilliant... A book alive with understated yearning

Literary Review

An eloquent fusion of the delicate and the direct

Financial Times, *Summer Reads of 2023*

This is McGuinness's best collection by far, and stands out from the crowd

Sunday Times

McGuinness has a delightfully distinctive voice… His buoyant imagination always carries the day… He can be breathtakingly simple, and to have written one poem as good as 'Tired Metaphor' is enough for any writer in any year

Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year*