Blood Feather

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.