Jilted City E-Book

Patrick McGuinness

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

PATRICK McGUINNESS

Jilted City

In memory of my mother

O mémoire, cité trahie

‘O memory, jilted city’

Henri Thomas

Acknowledgements

Many of these poems appeared first in the following magazines: Agenda, Alhambra Poetry Calendar, Archipelago, The London Review of Books, Planet, PN Review, The Times Literary Supplement and The Yellow Nib; and in the following books or anthologies: From the Small Back Room: A Festschrift for Ciaran Carson, edited by W.R. Irvine (Netherlea, Belfast, 2008), Branchlines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Lucy Newlyn and Guy Cuthbertson (Enitharmon, 2007), The European Constitution in Verse edited by David Van Reybrouck and Peter Vermeesch (Passaporta, Brussels, 2009) and Identity Parade: Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, edited by Roddy Lumsden (Bloodaxe, 2010).

‘Déja-vu’ appeared as a Treganna Press poetry card, with a cover image by Alun Hemming, whose ‘Urban Vulture’ provides the cover for this book.

Several of these poems also appeared in the pamphlet 19th Century Blues, which was a winner in the Poetry Business competition in 2006 and published by Smith Doorstop in 2007. I am grateful to Peter Sansom and The Poetry Business for permission to reprint it here. A broadsheet entitled Montreal and Other Poems appeared in the San Marco Press Five Poets series in 2006, with an Italian version of the title poem by Barbara del Mercado.

The sequence ‘Blue Guide’ also appears in French, in a version by Gilles Ortlieb, in the review Théodore Balmoral.

I am extremely grateful to Jennie Feldman for letting me use her inspired rendering of the line from Henri Thomas’s poem ‘Audides’ as the epigraph to this book, and letting me have ‘Jilted City’ as the title. The rest of the poem can be found in Into the Deep Street: Seven Modern French Poets 1938–2008, edited and translated by Jennie Feldman and Stephen Romer (Anvil, 2009).

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Acknowledgements

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

Also by Patrick McGuinness

Copyright