The Canals of Mars by Patrick McGuinness (28-Oct-2004) Paperback

by Patrick McGuinness

The beauty and strangeness of inner landscapes is reflected in these powerful poems. As each poem tends to the intricacies of human experience, their focus on the fractal patterns within familiar structuresadd an element of discovery and revelation to the poems, modulating and rendering strange these musings on what is ostensibly human.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published April 1, 2005

About the author

Born in Tunisia in 1968 to a Belgian French-speaking mother and an English father of Irish descent, he grew up in Belgium and also lived for periods in Venezuela, Iran, Romania and the UK. He currently lives in Oxford and in Wales teaching French and Comparative Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford.

Reviews

[Philippe · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was in a Venetian bookshop that I discovered Patrick McGuinness’ Canals of Mars in a bilingual edition (with the Italian translations by Giorgia Sensi flanking the original). It’s a collection that I revisit on a regular basis, not in the least because it includes an exquisitely moody meditation on my hometown. I’m quoting it here in full:

Leuven

The beguinhof’s pink brick, its labyrinthine
paths and winding waterways: a village
modelled on the human mind, a beating
maze of convolutions, each inhabitant

a thought, each visitor the flicker
of an instinct, a reflex in the city’s
lapping introspection. All is analogy,
everything is sensed first as something else:

feelings drift by on their way elsewhere,
amble into view on a tide of vagueness,
like disconnected household objects
breasting the water in a flooded house.

The river crumples in an aquatic frown;
something dark passes in the drifting sky;
trees take root in cloud; the town
is clenched around the river it flows by.

The poem's tone of gloomy introspection resonates with one of the collection’s central themes: „all is analogy”. We are entombed in our symbolic universe. The signifiers merely take root in clouds. McGuinnes, partly of Belgian extraction, muses on this peculiar little country as a metaphor for this inextricable state of epistemological limbo:

I spent autumn learning about autumn,
that its unmistakable confusion about what it was
was what made it what it was. So with Belgium.

Not even photography, that seemingly objective, artless art is able to faithfully render the world:

… The camera can euphemise
as much as language, as much as death
can put on shapes of sleeping, seem
temporary, hold its own reality at bay …

We simply have no grip on earthly affairs. „The world turns in the emptiness that holds it steady.” We live in The Age of the Empty Chair. Commenting on Monet's Beach at Trouville, a painting that features a white empty chair set between two relaxing women, McGuinness concludes:

The chair suggest all that can be suggested about
change, and yet remains
apart from it: the way a sail suggests the wind; the way
a shell holds
a recording of the waves, even as the waves turn
around it.



Lovely, these stern, stoical and slightly hermetic assessments of human precariousness and futility.