Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Blood Feather
Author: MCGUINNESS PATRICK
Format: PAPERBACK
Imprint: JONATHAN CAPE
Price: $33.00
Publishing status: Active
A clear-sighted, intimate new poetry collection from the prizewinning author of Other People’s Countries and Throw me to the Wolves
By the author of Other People’s Countries and Throw Me to the Wolves
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, ‘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.
ISBN: 9780224098311
Pages: 80
Edition: 01