The in-between place is overcrowded poetic territory, but Patrick McGuinness has a sound claim to it: he was born in Tunisia of Belgian and Newcastle-Irish stock, and now lives in Caernarfon, North Wales. In 'Article 0.5: The Right To Be In-Between' he even proposes a clause for the European Constitution which 'enshrines inalienably the right to alienation/for those who want it ....' The constitution of Jilted City  is nothing if not European: the title comes from Jennie Feldman's translation of a poem by Henri Thomas, and McGuinness goes on to refer to Mallarme, Rilke, Baudelaire, Cervantes, Rimbaud, Proust, Jacques Brel and Christian Dotrement.

McGuinness's wry take on identity politics means that Belgium is very much the dead centre of this Europe: 'our annual summers in Bouillon, / where our Belgitude rose up in us like the damp / behind the wallpaper'. The longest poem here, 'Blue Guide', is a series of vignettes based on the stations of the Brussels-Luxembourg railway line. As a child, McGuinness used the line for a twenty minute commute; but he later realized that the line connected him to all of Europe: 'All I had to do was stay on the train a little longer'.

The sequence explored the tension between evocative childhood memories and McGuinness's watchful refusal to be seduced. Of the Bruxelles-Luxemborg station he recalls the

'funeral blush' of marzipan fruit in the chocolatier's window,
laid out their crinkled doilies like Lenin in his mausoleum,
and the ghost of their taste in my mouth: sugar dipped in formaldehyde.

McGuinness's chief virtue is the subtlety of his observing eye, which he keeps trained on 'the border between the over- / and the unexamined life'. He can slip seamlessly from description to abstraction with no loss of precision, as when a disquisition on dust begins predictably enough in the everyday ('it fills the gulf behind the sofa, / that small domestic void') before concluding:

It 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 incremantal, deciduous, and undecided.

The unforeseeable, perfect adjective 'deciduous' indicates the scrupulous intelligence of this writing. McGuinness examines, through a clear lens, subjects that poetry often sees in soft focus: nostalgia, loss, nationhood, identity. Even literary staples, such as elegies for dead parents, in his hands are never merely set-pieces. The collection concludes with a short selection of translations from Liviu Campanu, an imaginary Romanian poet. Campanu, we are told, was exiled to Constanta during Ceausescu's regime, allowing McGuinness to explore his themes of displacement and internalized political deadlock with a darker, sourer wit. The title of 'The Ovid Complex' is the first of many self-referential puns: 'I'm not adapting. But what's worse/ is that I'm getting used to it....'Campanu's presence means that Jilted City trails an unexpectedly dark shadow: 'what survives of us/ is what was least intended to go on after'.

Apart from the inevitable blank-page poem (boys: stop it!), McGuinness's poems never waste your time or overstay their welcome; consequently, you return to them and spend longer than you'd intended. Jilted City has the wit and lightness of touch that made McGuinness's first collection, The Canals of Mars, so welcome; what it adds is a new depth of feeling and maturity in vision.