The diversity that this new collection by Patrick McGuinness offers is engagingly deceptive. Jilted City gathers poems ranging in length from aphorisms to longish verse, a sequence of note like travel poems evoking Belgian train stations, a versified pseudo-article fior a tentative European Constitution, a mere quotation (by the Belgian writer Maeterlinck) cast into a  touching persective by the title given to it, as well as versions made "after" poems by Rilke, Baudelaire and the Belgian surrealist Christian Dotremont. Rimbaud and Flaubert also come on stage. Last but hardly least, the volume concludes with eleven thoughtful poems "rendered" from the work of the fictional Romanian poet, Liviu Campana. Although the language employed is a precise, lexically rich English, French words are also affectionaltely present in these oft-playful but sometimes discreetly melancholy poems written by a man born in Tunisia of an Irish father and a Belgian francophone mother. The author of The Canals of Mars (2004) has respect for the classical poetics, as his strophes, meters, rhymes and half rhymes amply show; but the translator of Mallarme's For Anatole's tombe also favours experimentation.

Yet Jilted City is no hotchpotch. Within this heterogeneous display of curiosity and formal inventiveness lurks a common denominator: the enigmas of memory. The hint is half-dropped in the title, which is borrowed from the line, "O memoire, cite trahie," penned by the french poet Henri Thomas. It is memory that is "jilted", and Mcguinness focuses from the various angles on how remembering, which seems to give our brief existence some comforting roots actually functions on self-deceiving premises. The notion that one can willfully make the past present in memory likewise comes forth as false security. What initially seems like a quip or even a practical joke - the maxim Deja-vu first printed on page 13 as "two tenses grapplling with one instant, one perception;/ forgotten as it happens, recalled before it has begun" and then repeated on page 58, with the lines reversed- deepens in meaning when reread in this context. Similarly, the poet's humour springs from a more pensive source than on ehad surmised. Mcguiness tellingly ends his book with Campana's In the Museum of Archaeology which meditates on Proust's theory one we disbelieve despite our daily lives" daily demonstration of it's truth, notably that "what survives of us / is what was least intended to go on after."

Stylistically disparate pieces therefore share the common cause of recording unexpected vestiges of the past as they surface in our eyes and mind. Or are deposited like "dust," to cite "The Shape of Nothing Happening." "Dust knows the places we have forgotten," begins this important poem, which sums up the poet's philosophical vision:

[Dust] is the shape of nothing, the shape of nothing happening,
and of nothing's impossibility; matter worrying away
at trying not to be, and being all the while; reminding us
there are no absolutes, that all is graded on the scale,
that all is incremental, deciduous and undecided.

Given this near-random accumulation of temps perdu, McGuinness naturally questions his "Belgitude" and his friendship to the French language. The former sometimes startles him like "Belgitude" and his relationship to the French language. The former sometimes startles him like "Belga smoke over the exhalations of the waffel-stand." Associated with the country's past and the poet's youth that are now overwhelmed by the present, such telltale details can be caught only "for a moment" as they clash with "the smell of barley, hops, fresh diesel and its negative-used air." McGuinness's seventeen-stop train trip, which includes a coda listing "stations where the train doesn't stop", is a pleasant sequence appealing, in English, to poetic and poetic prose forms perfected by several generations of French strollers and train riders, represented most recently by Jacques Reda. Like Reda, Mcguinness glimpses details whose significance teases but does not reveal itself entirely; and he sometimes ruminates on their pertinence to his childhood summer sojourns in Belgium. As to French, it is "my mother's tongue if not, any more, my mother-tongue. It's freighted/ with a kind of loss hers, mine." As another way of construing the title, one necessarily betrays one's memory in our day and age.

French helps him (and us) pinpoint the more profound movement of these poems, whose secret poignancy is disclosed slowly. "The word depart, so definitive and final," notes McGuinness comparing it to "the word partance, an ongoing  going, a leaving// still entangled in itself years later." This volume humourously, but also hauntingly chronicles this necessary "ongoing going" this "leaving," which can define living.