Blood Feather |
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Author:
| McGuinness, Patrick |
ISBN: | 978-0-224-09831-1 |
Publication Date: | Jun 2023 |
Publisher: | Penguin Random House
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Imprint: | Jonathan Cape |
Book Format: | Paperback |
List Price: | AUD $32.99 |
Book Description:
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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....
More Description 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.