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In Mortal Memory is a collection of lyric poems, celebratory if often melancholy, both elegiac and ironic. Affirming that life is ‘all becoming’ McNeillie mourns what that means in terms of loss and sorrow at time passing. The sea is a powerful presence, its meaning drawn both from the northern landscapes in which McNeillie’s work is rooted, and from the work of French poets, from Baudelaire and Hugo to Rimbaud and Corbière. The poems pitch up and down across formalities, against the idea of purity, while sustaining a rhyming, singing line.
From reviews of Slower:
A living poetic language flows, easy and slangy…the occasional poems which punctuate the later part of the collection are vitalized and real, among them elegies that remember mourning his father’s death, and other deaths, which ring true, urged into being by poetry itself. Gillian Clarke
Cover painting: Giorgio de Chirico, The Nostalgia of thePoet,1914. Oil and charcoal on canvas, 35 5/16 x 16 in. (89.7 x 40.7cm).The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice1976,76.2553.65 © DACS 2009. Cover design StephenRaw.com
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