From the Times Literary Supplement, Friday 19th November 2004

Soon after the death of his father, James Joyce wrote "Ecce Puer", a short poem linking the leavetaking of the eldest Joyce with the arrival of the author's grandson, Stephen. It closes theatrically: "A child is sleeping, / An old man gone. / Oh, father forsaken, / Forgive your son!" Written "in memory of my father, and in welcome to my son", the opening poem in Patrick McGuinness's debut collection is a studied variation on Joyce's theme: "In the wings there is one who waits to go on / and another, his scene run, who waits to go". The poet imagines their two souls meeting "like crossed letters touching in the dark; // the blank page and the turned page, / the first and the last, shadows folding // over and across me, in whom they're bound". The natural wholesomeness of the old making room for the new comes as a stark contrast to McGuinness's recent translation of Mallarmé's For Anatole's Tomb (reviewed in the TLS, March 19), a pile of grief stricken fragments written after the death of Mallarmé's only son. The one example of these to surface in The Canals of Mars is a chilling séance with death itself, who "whispers softly": "As for the others, for the living, / their mourning, etc., / that is just my shadow clothing them in black".

Poems dealing with death, disease, oblivion and oppression are seldom as poised as those encountered here. McGuinness projects the jarring absurdity of unnatural death through an intricate style buzzing with atonalities, asymmetries, partial repetitions and distorted echoes. The repetition of words and images creates an effect of threads dropped and taken up again: the "white place" one woman briefly "dies into" in a poem contemplating near-death experiences re-emerges as "white-noises" heard by a feverish child (himself close to death), before this in turn is taken and used to describe the "sullen...muzak" of a swarm of wasps in the speaker's home. Sharing an image amongst various contexts in this way results in a thoughtful study in perspective: a domestic wasps' nest is measured on the same scale - of unwelcome foreigness - as a child's life-threatening illness.

Less sombre poems are eclectic in their subject matter. Erik Satie's surrealist prattlings, or the problems of Martian drought, offer vehicles for a playful mode of writing, as does a sequence of poems about Belgium, including such titles as "The Belgiad" and "Belgitude". Devoted to the askew river-reflections cast by Belgian cities, the sequence involves clever play with linguistic mirrors: "Louvain, Gand, Anvers / river-cities face to face with themselves / Leuven, Gent, Antwerpen". Other such features are the anagrammatic uncertainty of "300 kilometres of frontier / united and untied", the eerie topsy-turviness of trees that "take root in cloud", and a swan that swims "neck and neck with his ghost". As "the real and the refelected / swap dimensions", the poet grows distrustful: "mirage / or mirror image?" he asks in an inspired piece of tmesis ("mirage" is extended to "mirror image" by the insertion of a back-to-front "mir(r)or"). Further evidence of McGuinness's linguistic flair is found in a handful of stunning translations ("My Glasgohemia" is a dizzy rendering of Rimbaud's "Ma Bohème" to date), as well as in the many thoughtful, understated poems describing a landscape of voguish vaguery: "All has that faint emphasis, as if the place were in italics, / could look like elsewhere yet be nowhere else". The Canals of Mars is infused with that altitudinous (or even Belgitudinous) grace.