Jilted City

About the Book

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.

Table of Contents:
Contents
I
Déjà-vu
Blue
The Age of the Empty Chair
Noon at the DoubleTree Hotel
The Shape of Nothing Happening
French
Le Grand Pardon
[Untitled]
The Companions
Nineteenth-Century Blues
Charleville
Black Box
II Blue Guide
I Gare du Nord
II Gare centrale
III Gare du Midi
IV Quartier-Léopold
V Schuman
VI Bruxelles-Luxembourg
VII Ottignies
VIII Gembloux
Correspondances
IX Namur
X Ciney
XI Marloie
XII Jemelle
XIII Libramont
XIV Bouillon
XV Marbehan
XVI Arlon
Kleinbettingen
XVII Luxembourg
Stations where the train doesn’t stop
III
My Mother
L’Air du Temps
The Other Side
Montréal
Daytime Drinking
Lists
Spleen: Cardiff Matchday Blues
The Thaw
I Illegible waves of wood
II Lapland
III ! ! !
IV Stills
V writing the words
VI LO! v e
i.m. Jacques Brel (1929-1978)
Article 0.5: The Right to Be In-Between
Poem in White Ink
The Empty Frame
House Clearance
The Clamour
Déjà-vu
IV City of Lost Walks: Poems by Liviu Campanu
from The Ovid Complex (1989)
Poems I–VIII
Scenarios for Lovers and Magnets
from City of Lost Walks (1985)
In the Natural History Museum
In the Museum of Archaeology
Notes

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. His second Carcanet collection, Jilted City, was published in 2010. 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).

Review :

'Patrick McGuinness has constructed a rough guide to a lonely planet, full of unquenchable cultural curiosity and irresistible ironies... Alive to every undulation of the linguistic landscapes in which he moves, McGuinness’s poems often pivot on the cross-cultural possibilities of a single isolated word.'
New Welsh Review

All at sea and off the rails
Tunisian-born Patrick McGuinness, who lectures in French at Oxford, is preoccupied by departures in his collection Jilted City.Railway stations recur as places where a life might go forwards or backwards.In 'Bouillon', a defunct station where McGuinness's grandfather worked serves as a prompt for grief.That poem is part of a series called 'Correspondances', a pun on the French word for transport connections, as well as a nod to Baudelaire.McGuinness scripts erudite parts for other grands hommes - Flaubert, Brel - making witty use of an all-too-often nostalgic heritage. Guardian
'Time without the clock' by Sean O'Brien
In his absorbing debut, The Canals of Mars, Patrick McGuinness wrote about Belgium while indicating that he was also in some way writing about the north of Ireland – two divided societies created artificially and living with the consequences. In an odd way, the inexactness of the fit made the implied comparison more intriguing. In Jilted City, a stronger book than its predecessor, McGuinness keeps faith with Belgium, undertaking a personal exploration of parts of it and in the process making the habitual English dismissal of the place seem merely daft. Belgium's anxieties and seeming paralysis have powerful resonance.
Belgium is "etouffé", choked or stuffed with history, McGuinness notes, and fittingly his central journey is by railway. That work of 19th-century genius can still detain 21st-century travellers inside metaphors they might hope to have outgrown, their "leaving / still entangled in itself years later like the sound of a train / turning the corner, its siren coiled around the echo of the last to go / and the tunnel taking a moulding of our departures" ("Gare centrale"). There follows a dream-diversion at Quartier-Leopold, in the direction of the Congo, "a heart of darkness where the train stops", a colonial catastrophe with which we are still living.
For all his power to evoke, McGuinness might well agree with Auden's observation in "Brussels in Winter": "Its formula escapes you: it has lost / The certainty that constitutes a thing." McGuinness, half-Belgian, half Tyneside-Irish, is well qualified imaginatively to investigate the reticence and poisonous inertia revealed along the line as it struggles to escape the city: "Something is taking shape: a Leviathan fattened on damp / and disregard, the bureaucratic Unconscious, with its pagers, / mobile phones and trouserpresses". What he depicts hardly amounts to a society, but is rather the station car-park of Europe. English readers may find it oddly familiar in its blend of impertinence and incompetence and its complicated dividedness, as of a nation formed from and sustained by mutual dislike: for language and religion read class and location, perhaps.
McGuinness's slow, implacable rhythms, moving as though at shunting speed, enable us to savour a complex mixture of reactions, including contempt, melancholy, curiosity and gallows humour. WG Sebald, a great scrutineer of the railway terminus, may have travelled some of this ground before, but there is clearly a good deal at stake for McGuinness imaginatively; something that remains out of reach but is present as though in negative when he contemplates "all the station clocks from here to Arlon, // their blank faces hung like moons above the platforms / where sheets of tabulated time contrive to be at once / exact (the 11.27 to Namur) / and untrue (it isn't there). / Correspondances /is what they call connecting trains, even when / they don't connect. Even when they don't exist."
The reference to Baudelaire's "Correspondances" also serves as a reminder of the importance of symbolist art and writing in Belgium and vice versa – James Ensor, Jean Delville, strange characters such as Félicien Rops and Georges Rodenbach. The landscape, which seems invested with a significance which a combination of secrecy and exhaustion forbids it to release, sometimes resembles a religion in majestic decline. Passing though Jemelles, we glimpse "the old station standing at our back, // a haunting in red brick with smoke effects of brick dust. / Then the industrial-sized rose window / of the engine-shed . . ." The supernaturalism of these railways can also shift from the religiose to the profane – witness the alarming Paul Delvaux mural of a girl in a white dress among rearing black engines in the station brasserie at Bruges.
By the end of the journey, without having convincingly arrived anywhere, it appears that the railway itself is a language at once chaotic and inescapable: even when disembarked, the traveller will always be "so close to the station you can hear yourself miss the trains". You're not going anywhere. "Charleville" visits the birthplace of Rimbaud, just over the French border, sharing a landscape with Belgium. However far you travel – Ethiopia, in Rimbaud's case – "you never leave", and McGuinness reads the working landscape in the light of the poems: "barges / slip through bilgewater with rooftile cargoes / of Ardennes Ardoise: slates bound into sheaves, / books with blackboard pages and all the boats / were floating libraries and all the letters spelled azure // or, after rain, erasure, which soon became its synonym. / Now his name is on every shopfront." There are gifts, then, but no escape. Life itself feels like exile without ever making it clear where from.
Aptly, the book's closing sequence, "City of Lost Walks", contains poems by an imaginary Romanian poet, Liviu Campanu, exiled under Ceausescu to Constanta, the Black Sea port where Ovid himself saw out his punishment by the Emperor Augustus. This too is well-travelled ground: Geoffrey Hill and Christopher Reid, among others, have used invented poets allegedly working in other languages. McGuinness's contribution is harsh and witty. The archaeological museum takes us close to "time without the clock, / the river without the bank, that point when either / all is form or there's no such thing". The pessimism is invigorating, and Jilted City grows more powerful with each rereading. 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 atouching 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 ongoinggoing, 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. Patrick McGuinness is a poet in the literal sense of someone who is skilled at the craft, but also in the figurative sense of a person with imagination, ontological curiosity and vision. We know this as early as the two-lined opening poem Deja vu: 'two tenses grappling with one instat, one perception: forgotten as it happens, recalled before it has begun.'
The poems in this collection examine and re-examine the tensions between past and present, and presence and absence, through abstract meditaitions, dramatic monologues, autobiographical narratives and finally, translations. McGuinness is proficient in all of these modes; equally he is as comfortable with the long, sprawling line as with the imagistic short line, and as persuasive with a conversational tone as with a high minded lyrical. e understands the value of silence, as in 'Poem in White Ink' which, like a verbal rendering of John Cage's 'silent' composition, is a page without verse. At the other extreme, he can fill a page energetically and even volubly.
He displays erudition, too - a result, in part, of an international scope of influence, which stands to reason: to borrow Ben Wilkinson's pithy desription of McGuinness' complicated national identity, 'he is a writer born in Tunisia, of Irish extraction and now living in Wales, translating from French and teaching in England.' There is yet another angle: a Belgian connection, which McGuinness refers to i both the notes and in the apparently autobiographical poem 'french' that is about identity , emmory, the chain of gerations and his mother's language. there are French and Belgian references throughtout the collection: titles, epigraphs, dedications, translations and allusions.
But one of the strongest and most representative poems has, to my ear, the American music of Wallace Stevens. In the stunning conclusion of 'The shape of nothing happening', we have these lines
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;
which echo the conclusion of 'The Snowman,'
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
without sounding like parody. And, though 'Blue; has an antecedent in Mallarme, it, too, recalls stevens's poetry of the imagination: abstract and philosophical, interrogating what is a and is not there, as in these lines:
...the great illusion
that every day it starts again, from zero, that perfect world-
shaped formula for all of nothing: O
These poems are diachronic: difference points in time are in paradoxical coexistence. A historical monologue spoken from the grave by a 'companion' {the kind of domestic employee one finds in POirot novels] includes historical snapshots, a reference to birth, and images associated with death and preservation. Another poem imagines a pure and pre-modern sky, yet aeroplanes fly around the poem even as they are meant to be absent. In this and similar poems, ecological anxiety is expressed and disapprocal is implied - but the tone is never preachy. In fact McGuinness' voice is consistently likeable, and one never feels excluded from personal poems addressed to family members or even those with esoteric subjects.
I found only the middle section, 'Blue Guide', slightly disappointing. A series of disjointed ruminations about a train line between Brussels and Luxembourg, these poems do not, for me, quite reach the balance between the personal, the literary and the historucal to which they seem to aspire. Ans becase the last poem in section one is about a wrecked marriage, and because the first poem in 'Blue Guide' begins, 'Arriving is like walking in on someone else's divorce', I felt directed to read this section as a metaphor for a break-up, and therefore approached the sequence misguidedly. Despite my ambivalence about the success of this section, the writing is faultless, the historical tidbits are fascinating and the journey into memory is compelling.
The book concludes with a beautifully translated sequence of poems by Romanian poet Liviu Campanu (1932-1994) who fell out of favour with the Ceausescu regime. These translations effectively - even uncannily - complement McGuinness' own work, examining similar themes, both literary and metaphysical.
McGuinness wears many hats. He edited Lynette Robert's Collected poems and Diaries, Letters and Recollections, as well as T.E.Hulme's Selected Writings; he translated Stephane Mallarme's For Anatole's Tomb and he is a professor of French and Comparative Literature at St Anne's college, Oxford. We should consider ourselves fortunate that he has found the time amidst these ohther projects to deliver this fine collection of poems. 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. 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. Patrick McGuinness is part Irish and part Belgian by extraction, and Jilted City describes a landscape of the mind which is partially based on childhood memory and has its roots in literature - the author teaches Fresh in Oxford. It is a book which both dallies over and parleys with the French language (the poet's mother tongue), French scenes, French books. This is the rich, resonant, haunting poetry of an in-between poet who inhabits an in-between world. Patrick McGuinness’s fine debut collection, The Canals of Mars (2004), was just that: a collection. Its poems explored his complex background and shifting allegiances – McGuinness was born in Tunisia to a Belgian and Newcastle Irish family, and now lives in Wales – with alienation and familial tenderness carefully poised. They also exploited a lightly worn, distinctly francophile, erudition. For McGuinness, a Professor of French at Oxford, is a man of many parts: the author of a study on Maeterlinck, a translator of Huysmans and Mallarmé, and an editor of T. E. Hulme and Lynette Roberts. But the collection – and this was very much an aspect of its success – never quite added up to more than the sum of its parts. In the words of ‘Belgitude’, one of its more programmatic performances, ‘its unmistakeable confusion about what it was/ was what made it what it was’.
Jilted City, McGuinness’s second collection, carries forward many of the same themes and qualities. The poet’s ‘belgitude’ is again to the fore, most prominently in the excellent sequence ‘Blue Guide’, which takes in past train journeys on ‘La Ligne 162’ that runs from Brussels to Luxembourg. A pair of fleeting, delicate, elegies to his mother rest alongside verses after Baudelaire (‘Spleen’ transposed to matchday Cardiff), Rilke and the Belgian surrealist Charles Dotremont. But the book marks a significant advance on its predecessor in coming together more as a complete volume. Its poems subtly inform one another, yet somehow without descending into the too-easy comfort of offering straightforward analogies and identifications. It is also intricately structured, with two groups of lyrics either side of ‘Blue Guide’, followed by the closing sequence ‘City of Lost Walks’. This purports to be extracts translated from the work of the Romanian poet Liviu Campanu, who is in fact McGuinness’s own creation – rather in the manner of Geoffrey Hill’s fictitious Spanish poet Sebastian Arrurruz, author of the closing poems in King Log (1968). At first glance, this all seems fairly disparate. But words and ideas start to carry across from one poem and one section to another.
‘Blue’ in the opening section, as its epigraph signals, feeds off Mallarmé’s ‘L’Azur’ to draw a contrast between the clear sky of the past and the polluted sky of the present:
Azure! Azure! Azure! Azure! … all that was before:
before we rode it in planes and used it to park satellites
or as ethereal landfill for our emissions.
The earthbound diction, in a kind of (satisfyingly clunky) Martian School meets Gaia manoeuvre, works to belie the sky’s promissory emptiness. Pollution’s effects are not to be wished away in a dream of blue beginnings. But this sky and the terms of its figuration return in altered form in the later ‘Nineteenth-Century Blues’. Musing on Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education, the poem’s speaker suddenly observes:
The men are rudderless, bobbing like those balloons
That overflew the siege of Paris:
They roll on frictionless, leaving holes in the air.
The awkwardness of the figurative language here – the nautical shifting to the air-borne – and in ‘Blue’ draws the poems into ironic dialogue. Our inability to perceive our present is aligned with these characters’ inability to impress themselves on their epoch (and by extension Flaubert’s attempt to depict a generation); the grounded sky has somehow become these floating men.
Such failures of perception, language and history refract off one another. The presence of various legacies – of family, class and, particularly, the nineteenth-century – is repeatedly registered yet never fully captured. What is grasped is merely the shape of the past (one of the collection’s poems is titled ‘The Shape of Nothing Happening’). In ‘The Age of the Empty Chair’, a response to Monet’s The Beach at Trouville, painted as McGuinness reminds us during ‘week one of the Franco-Prussian war’ with the very ‘sand in the paint’, an empty chair ‘suggests all that can be suggested about change but it remains/ apart from it’.
This sense of connections felt yet not straightforwardly made and of existing in a state of perpetual aftermath is made explicit in the slow-motion lines of ‘Blue Guide’, as it creeps and creaks down through Wallonia. In Belgium the nineteenth century is ‘still shaking/ on the rails, the twentieth a late train’. Brussels’ Quartier-Léopold station, only the façade of which now remains, is envisaged as a disturbing colonial relic, ‘a heart of darkness where the train stops’. Yet its recent replacement, Bruxelles-Luxembourg, offers a no-less disturbing vision of a post-national future ‘taking shape’. Resting below the huge new European parliament building, ‘a Leviathan fattened on damp/ and disregard’, the station is filled with a deathly kind of euro-signage:
A new language which has no name
spreads along the billboards and the shopsigns – Euro Dago,
Le Y€S Bar, Het Leader Bowling – beside which the sign marked
Liquidation totale seems full of Old Testament promise.
The poems in the first three sections of the volume, cast in a similar mode to McGuinness’s earlier work, lay the ground for his highly successful new departure, the donning of the mask of Campanu in ‘City of Lost Walks’. Alienation is reshaped as actual exile: the Romanian poet writes having been banished to Constanţa (paralleling Ovid) by the Ceaeseşcu regime. But far from being a worthy reimagining of life under a totalitarian dictator, the persona seems to allow McGuinness to find a decidedly chattier, more hectoring, jokey and romantic voice. Yet it is shadowed by the troubling irony that this recovered testimony, this fragmentary monument to good humour and the tender passing moment, has not actually been found at all:
I’m not adapting. But what’s worse
is that I’m getting used to it: I’m a bad version
from the classics. Ovid in translationese,
jazzed up with radio and TV
(albeit black and white and with just one channel),
unable to hit the right note without feeling
I’m borrowing from someone else’s story.