Urban and Rural

Patrick McGuinness is primarily a poet of the city; when he travels it is by train, and what he maps are rail-tracks and the stations through which they pass. [...] McGuinness's imagination is stirred by 'cracked paint', garden paddling pools clotted with 'verdurous algae', rustling sidings and 'guano-coated buttresses'[...]

[...] McGuiness is by temperament a poet of the liminal: he loves to interrogate margins, edges and endings; he is intrigued by dissolution, illusion, ambiguity, and loss. He's at his best with a subject such as 'The Shape Of Nothing Happening', where he can worry away at

... 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...

In his parenthetical pair of two-liners entitled 'Deja-vu' (the second of which reverses the line order of the first), his strenuous intellect seeks to articulate an experience that cannot be understood, since the mind is uncertain whether the feeling by which it has been visited, poisted between past and future, is real or imaginary. When he tackles lives they tend to be marked by unfulfilment ('The Companions'), or, like those of Flaubert's characters, leave behind them only 'holes in the air'.

It's appropriate, therefore, that the Romanian poet whose poems make up the final part of the book should be - like Duncan Bush's Victor Bal - a victim of totalitarian oppression and an invention.