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

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The Noises Things Make When They Leave' elegises today's post-industrial landscapes, their people and professions: sidelined by literature, bypassed by globalisation. The poem, and the volume as a whole, charts the emergence of a new voice which is at once warm and edgy. The canals and rivers of Oxford aren’t working waterways anymore, but livelihoods used to depend on them.

Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness | Waterstones

What's stopping us telling the stories of women's inner lives, or listening to them, especially once they become mothers, or are over forty? At the Back of the Painting is a dark liberation that describes what one envisages as a troubled Vermeer. Maybe even a frisson, whereby the grey and fading things of the world suddenly reveal something beyond their taken-for-granted presence. In his new collection of poetry, a Financial Times Summer Read 2023, Patrick McGuinness plays with time and the ghosts of the past, personal and collective.Evans shares with Geoffrey Hill a sincerity so intense at times that it can tip into anxiety, as well as an interest in English history. 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. In Factory for Sad Thoughts, a prose piece, he playfully proposes: “Of all the poems I’ve ever written, this is the one I didn’t. Patrick McGuinness is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Anne's College.

Patrick McGuinness · Poem: ‘Landline’ · LRB 16 March 2023 Patrick McGuinness · Poem: ‘Landline’ · LRB 16 March 2023

Every October we bring the biggest names in local, regional, and international literary talent, media and the arts to Sheffield. Composite: AI CAConrad sits for seven days in front of a Rothko in You Don’t Have What It Takes to Be My Nemesis. The collection brims with reverie and there are gripping poems about subjects not expecting attention: trains through Belgium, postindustrial landscapes and pigeons – the feral and the tame who live “show home lives” and “gentrify the air”. Laird’s fifth collection glimmers with angsty maturity as it manoeuvres its way between introspection and elegy. Tracing ambiguities in a twilight haze will always be a ready pitfall for a work of this sort, but it is avoided here, and the poet achieves a rare, brittle clarity.

The image that gives the volume its title and is itself the title of one of the poems – ‘ Blood Feather’ – seems to contain a guiding principle: a pigeon hits a window, makes a sound, presumably causes some commotion, or maybe simply slips away again, and leaves ‘a ghost against the glass’ which remains, for now, until ‘the next rain against the window’. Language, Poetry and Rhetoric’, A Cultural History of Ideas in the Age of Empire, eds Johnson and Rosenfeld, Bloomsbury, 2022, pp. Actresses discover there are far fewer roles once they're no longer seen as young; whilst middle-aged and older women's lives are conflated, as if they are having exactly the same experiences.