Patrick McGuinness

Blood Feather Patrick McGuinness

By the author of Other People's Countries and Throw Me to the WolvesIn 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, 'Mother as Spy' - a series of deeply moving poems about his 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 Cooling Towers of Didcot' 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.'In his intimate, confiding voice, McGuinness shows how identity is layered, permeable, always in motion - how we are always actor and audience to ourselves.