Jilted City

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).

• ContentsIDéjà-vuBlueThe Age of the Empty ChairNoon at the DoubleTree HotelThe Shape of Nothing HappeningFrenchLe Grand Pardon[Untitled]The CompanionsNineteenth-Century BluesCharlevilleBlack BoxII Blue GuideI Gare du NordII Gare centraleIII Gare du MidiIV Quartier-LéopoldV SchumanVI Bruxelles-LuxembourgVII OttigniesVIII GemblouxCorrespondancesIX NamurX CineyXI MarloieXII JemelleXIII LibramontXIV BouillonXV MarbehanXVI ArlonKleinbettingenXVII LuxembourgStations where the train doesn’t stopIIIMy MotherL’Air du TempsThe Other SideMontréalDaytime DrinkingListsSpleen: Cardiff Matchday BluesThe ThawI Illegible waves of woodII LaplandIII ! ! !IV StillsV writing the wordsVI LO! v ei.m. Jacques Brel (1929-1978)Article 0.5: The Right to Be In-BetweenPoem in White InkThe Empty FrameHouse ClearanceThe ClamourDéjà-vuIV City of Lost Walks: Poems by Liviu Campanufrom The Ovid Complex (1989)Poems I–VIIIScenarios for Lovers and Magnetsfrom City of Lost Walks (1985)In the Natural History MuseumIn the Museum of ArchaeologyNotes

'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