The Canals of Mars
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Carcanet Press Ltd
Published:1st Oct '04
Should be back in stock very soon
The Canals of Mars begins with a poem elegising the poet's father and welcoming his newborn son. It concludes with a moment in which everything 'is finished and about to happen'. Patrick McGuinness's poems in this powerful first collection sharply recreate the beauty and strangeness of inner landscapes. He reveals the fractal patterns within familiar structures: the tree within the leaf, the recurrence that unfolds to create a fugue, how common experience is rediscovered within the newly learnt words of a foreign language. A Welsh drystone wall is built of live air, an extinct Martian world mirrors human suffering, an ultrasound scan images a human baby as a luminous constellation.
From the Times Literary Supplement, Friday 19th November 2004
Soon after the death of his father, James Joyce wrote "Ecce Puer", a short poem linking the leavetaking of the eldest Joyce with the arrival of the author's grandson, Stephen.It closes theatrically: "A child is sleeping, / An old man gone. / Oh, father forsaken, / Forgive your son!" Written "in memory of my father, and in welcome to my son", the opening poem in Patrick McGuinness's debut collection is a studied variation on Joyce's theme: "In the wings there is one who waits to go on / and another, his scene run, who waits to go".The poet imagines their two souls meeting "like crossed letters touching in the dark;
ISBN: 9781857547726
Dimensions: 215mm x 135mm x 5mm
Weight: 95g
240 pages