Jilted City

by Patrick McGuinness

Overview

The poems in Jilted City inhabit in-between-places, when a border is being crossed, a word is slipping into another language, when memory is translating loss. 'From Stations where the train doesn't stop' in 'Blue Guide', following a train journey through Belgium, to 'City of Lost Walks', English versions of a dissident Romanian poet whose poetry fails to register except in the form of an omission, McGuinness explores transition and translation, the afterlife of absences. Wit and paradox are at the heart of a collection that finds unforeseen connections between place and displacement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781847779212
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	04/01/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Patrick McGuinness was born in 1968 in Tunisia. In 1998 he won an Eric Gregory Award for poetry from the Society of Authors and his work has appeared in the Independent, PN Review, Poetry Wales, Leviathan and other journals and magazines, as well as the anthology New Poetries II, edited by Michael Schmidt (Carcanet). His first collection, The Canals of Mars, appeared in 2004. Also for Carcanet, McGuinness has translated For Anatole's Tomb by Stephane Mallarme from the French and edited the prose and poems of the Welsh modernist poet Lynette Roberts. He is a fellow of St Anne's College, University of Oxford, where he lectures in French. He lives in Cardiff. In 2009 was made Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes académiques for services to French culture. In 2011 he was made Chevalier des Artes et des Lettres by the French government. His academic books include Maurice Maeterlinck and The Making of Modern Theatre (Oxford UP, 2000), Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de Siecle (University of Exeter Press, 2000), and he has edited the Penguin Classics edition of Against Nature by J-K Huysmans and T.E. Hulme's Selected Writings for Carcanet. His French Anthologie de la Poesie symboliste et decadente is published by Les Belles Lettres (Paris, 2001).

Table of Contents

I

Déjà-vu 13

Blue 14

The Age of the Empty Chair 15

Noon at the Double Tree Hotel 16

The Shape of Nothing Happening 17

French 18

Le Grand Pardon 19

[Untitled] 20

The Companions 21

Nineteenth-Century Blues 22

Charleville 23

Black Box 24

II Blue Guide

I Gare du Nord 27

II Gare centrale 27

III Gare du Midi 28

IV Quartier-Léopold 28

V Schuman 28

VI Bruxelles-Luxembourg 29

VII Ottignies 29

VIII Gembloux 30

Correspondances 30

IX Namur 31

X Ciney 32

XI Marloie 32

XII Jemelle 32

XIII Libramont 33

XIV Bouillon 34

XV Marbehan 35

XVI Arlon 36

Kleinbettingen 36

XVII Luxembourg 37

Stations where the train doesn't stop 37

III

My Mother 41

L'Air du Temps 42

The Other Side 43

Montréal 44

Daytime Drinking 45

Lists 46

Spleen: Cardiff Matchday Blues 48

The Thaw

I Illegible waves of wood 49

II Lapland 49

III !!! 50

IV Stills 50

V writing the words 50

VI LO! v e 51

i.m. Jacques Brel (1929-1978) 52

Article 0.5: The Right to Be In-Between 53

Poem in White Ink 54

The Empty Frame 55

House Clearance 56

The Clamour 57

Déjà-vu 58

IV City of Lost Walks: Poems by Liviu Campanu

from The Ovid Complex (1989)

Poems I-VIII 63

Scenarios for Lovers and Magnets 67

from City of Lost Walks (1985)

In the Natural History Museum 68

In the Museum of Archaeology 70

Notes 73