Book description
The poems in Jilted City inhabit in-between-places, when a border
is being crossed, a word is slipping into another language, when
memory is translating loss. From 'Stations where the train doesn't
stop' in 'Blue Guide', following a train journey through Belgium,
to'City of Lost Walks', English versions of a dissident Romanian poet
whose 'poetry fails to register except in the form of an omission',
McGuinness explores transition and translation, the afterlife of
absences. Wit and paradox are at the heart of a collection that finds
unforeseen connections between place and displacement.
'McGuinness's chief virtue is the subtlety of his observing eye...
Jilted City has the wit and lightness of touch that made McGuinness's
first collection, The Canals of Mars, so welcome; what it adds is a new
depth of feeling and maturity in vision.' Paul Batchelor, TLS, 1 October
2010 'McGuinness's contribution is harsh and witty... Jilted City grows
more powerful with each rereading.' - Sean O'Brien, The Guardian, 29 May
2010
Patrick McGuinness was born in 1968 in Tunisia. In 1998 he
won an Eric Gregory Award for poetry from the Society of Authors and
his work has appeared in the Independent, PN Review, Poetry Wales,
Leviathan and other journals and magazines, as well as the anthology
New Poetries II, edited by Michael Schmidt (Carcanet). His first
collection, The Canals of Mars, appeared in 2004. Also for Carcanet,
McGuinness has translated For Anatole's Tomb by Stephane Mallarme from
the French and edited the prose and poems of the Welsh modernist poet
Lynette Roberts. He is a fellow of St Anne's College, University of
Oxford, where he lectures in French. He lives in Cardiff. In 2009 was
made Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes académiques for services to
French culture. In 2011 he was made Chevalier des Artes et des Lettres
by the French government.
His academic books include Maurice Maeterlinck and The Making of
Modern Theatre (Oxford UP, 2000), Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de
Siecle (University of Exeter Press, 2000), and he has edited the
Penguin Classics edition of Against Nature by J-K Huysmans and T. E.
Hulme's Selected Writings for Carcanet. His French Anthologie de la
Poesie symboliste et decadente is published by Les Belles Lettres
(Paris, 2001).
