Canals of Mars

McGuinness Patrick

"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.

About the Author

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 academiques 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).

Reviews

Awards won by Patrick McGuinness
Long-listed, 2011 Wales Book of the Year, English Language Category in The Western Mail (Jilted City)

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