Blood Feather, by the award-winning novelist and nonfiction writer Patrick McGuinness – also an academic (he teaches French at Oxford) – was prompted by the death of his mother. He has not published any poetry for 13 years, until now and this marvellous collection. He is writing about bereavement as erasure. The poems themselves seem slightly surprised by their existence, as if given half a chance, they might remove themselves from the page. Looking at his mother’s photograph, in Mother As Mirror, makes him feel that “I was the illusion”. Sure Things deftly explains there is no such thing as “sure” and, like the jetty that turns out not to exist, he feels unable to hang on to his own words. In Factory for Sad Thoughts, a prose piece, he playfully proposes: “Of all the poems I’ve ever written, this is the one I didn’t.”
Every word that crosses the border into poetry is worth reading. I loved Today Is Already Over, in which he remembers his mother’s pointless approach to tidying up. He does not need to acknowledge the inescapable thought that she has been cleared away herself. And he has more to add: “…she cleared up around me – /not after me but before./Removing my traces as I went…” (erasure again). It is a feat to write weight-bearing poems of such lightness. The balance, charm and wit of the writing are remarkable, not least because of his mother’s disequilibrium (there are poems that sensitively allude to psychiatric hospital and to her undergoing ECT).
