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

£6
FREE Shipping

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

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

RRP: £12.00
Price: £6
£6 FREE Shipping

In stock

We accept the following payment methods

Description

These poems seem to me a dance between substance and absence – the pursuit of ghosts, in all senses of the word: phantoms, shadows, the past, even ourselves. With award-winning novelist and critic Patrick McGuinness as your guide, you’ll uncover the riches of human experience lying in wait in the greatest poetry of the 20th century. In Uwe Johnson’s work, perspective doesn’t come from a bird’s-eye view but from staying at eye level – from looking and never stopping.

The Guardian The best recent poetry – review roundup | Poetry | The Guardian

Landline describes clearing his mother’s house after her death (his turn to tidy) and notes: “the polished square where the phone had sat”. But before my opening statement becomes a vague, catch-all appraisal of grief, which is the driving emotion of this volume, I must add that it is the precision with which these elusive things are pursued that sets these poems apart. 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. His memoir Other People’s Countries won the Duff Cooper Prize, and his second novel, Throw Me to the Wolves, won the Encore Award. 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.All the gaps where things can’t be said, where leaving empties into loss and where communication goes beyond language. This is poetry with real ambition that wants to hug us – it’s big, it’s queer and, like paprika, you can never have enough of it.

Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness | Waterstones

The weaving of memory, landscapes and different times in these poems attests to the pervasive desolation of grief, and how it is in many senses a mode of being, more than a feeling. In Factory for Sad Thoughts, he describes dreaming that he cannot read his dying mother’s lips: “I’m not even sure they are words and in what language”. He examines new identities forged by bilingualism and pays homage to his mother – herself displaced between languages. Formally inventive, rich in aslant borrowings, unafraid of visual and textual experiment, it is an exhilarating debut.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 and its limitations feature prominently in the poet’s reflections (‘When she spoke / her voice came from some far-off / dry-stone moorland where it echoed / across the acres razed inside her head’ ECT). The poems themselves seem slightly surprised by their existence, as if given half a chance, they might remove themselves from the page. The past for McGuinness is an irretrievable terrain, inhabiting the everyday with its ghostly present-absence, which in moments we are able to enter again as a tourist. CAConrad’s aim is to unplug from the corporate machine and reconnect themselves and their readers with the earth and animals and other people.

Blood Feather - Penguin Books UK

The canals and rivers of Oxford aren’t working waterways anymore, but livelihoods used to depend on them. 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. We celebrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander stories, traditions and living cultures; and we pay our respects to Elders past and present.Diverting questions about the double life of being bilingual arise but this collection is more about writing as survival: if you fail to find the words you need, in any language, what you have to say will vanish.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

Delivery & Returns

Fruugo

Address: UK
All products: Visit Fruugo Shop