Blood Feather

"Patrick McGuinness’s Blood Feather is a profound work of elegy, principally for the author’s mother, but also for the objects and places overtaken by time, for dynamited cooling towers and villages replaced by shopping centres, for the way one language replaces another. McGuinness is a brilliant ‘connoisseur of the noises things make when they leave.’ Being facetious I might respond as once Bob Dylan did when asked what a particular song was about: About three minutes. It is the energetic charge in a poem, the ritualising of language to powerful effect, that holds us in thrall. In Patrick McGuinness’s grief-laden poems it is the lyric pulse itself that compels our attention and we open in compassion to his loss."