Blood Feather | Fiction - www.zzdbook.com

Blood Feather

Dec 1, 2025 11:48 PM

Author:Patrick McGuinness

Blood Feather

In this intimate, confiding poetry collection, McGuinness shows how identity is layered, permeable, always in motion - how we are always actor and audience to ourselves

'This is McGuinness's best collection by far, and stands out from the crowd'

SUNDAY TIMES

In Blood Feather, a book of doubling and displacement, we see time in a new way: the past, personal and collective, lingering as an ever-present ghost - while lost beyond recall.

The first section, 'Squeeze the Day' - a series of deeply moving poems about the author's mother, displaced between languages - investigates her illness and death; how being bilingual is like having a double, a second self; how each self haunts the other. 'The Noises Things Make When They Leave' elegises today's post-industrial landscapes, their people and professions: sidelined by literature, bypassed by globalisation. The final sequence, 'After the Flood', links the book's themes, seeking a way of seeing things for the first time and the last time simultaneously. Exploring the gaps between languages and between our selves in language, Patrick McGuinness dreams of a new tense in which the world's losses are redeemed:

It's the anniversary of my mother's death,

and it's my mother's birthday -

the day she short-circuited the tenses,

made the current flow both ways.

A clear-sighted, intimate new poetry collection from the prizewinning author of Other People's Countries and Throw me to the Wolves.

Reviews

This is McGuinness's best collection by far, and stands out from the crowd

—— Sunday Times

An eloquent fusion of the delicate and the direct

—— Financial Times, *Summer Reads of 2023*

McGuinness has a delightfully distinctive voice… His buoyant imagination always carries the day… He can be breathtakingly simple, and to have written one poem as good as 'Tired Metaphor' is enough for any writer in any year

—— Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year*

Arresting... Reminds us that the best poetry is often that which never makes it from the notebook

—— Guardian

Patrick McGuinness writes of the other country of childhood with Proustian élan and Nabokovian delight

—— John Banville, author of The Sea

A deeply moving book of poems... Shimmering with the "sweet dark syrup" of humour, and gorgeous sleights of imagery, these are poems of extraordinary grace; they come up for air with their cupped hands empty, yet brimming with light

—— Fiona Benson, author of Ephemeron

An extraordinary writer of great compassion

—— Denise Mina, author of The Field of Blood

The brilliance of Patrick McGuinness's writing has made his memories unforgettable to the reader

—— Adam Foulds, author of The Quickening Maze

Brilliant... A book alive with understated yearning

—— Literary Review

[An] enigmatic novel . . . Deborah Levy's writing is rather like Philip Glass's music . . . mesmerising . . . enigmatic . . . refreshingly original

—— Amber Medland , Daily Telegraph

[A] wistful, fabular new novel . . . Since the 1990s, Deborah Levy's novels have combined a gauzy, episodic quality with pinpoint sensual detail drawn from peripatetic lives, crossing fluently between languages and national borders. Her style is full of gaps and sharp edges, circling around questions of gender and power, inheritance, autonomy and lack . . . The narrative here has a fittingly musical quality, running forward in spurts, pausing, repeating key phrases

—— Olivia Laing , Observer

Beautifully atmospheric . . . a dazzling portrait of melancholy and renewal . . . Levy is a master novelist and in August Blue, a beguiling story of how identities collide and crack, she shows us what it feels like to be a divided self

—— Independent ‘Best Books of 2023’

Deborah Levy delves into the deepest patterns of family connection and self-invention in August Blue, the riddling, elegant tale of a globe-trotting concert pianist whose subconscious is catching up with her

—— Guardian, 'Best Books of 2023'

Deborah Levy's hazy, dreamlike novels, often set in sun-drenched Mediterranean backdrops, are an essential accompaniment to any summer holiday . . . a lyrical, surreal trip of self discovery - one that is full of Levy's wit and curious images

—— Leila Slimani , i

A meditation on artistic creativity that is sensual, enigmatic and strangely addictive

—— Financial Times 'What to Read this Summer'

Levy is no stranger to the uncanny. Her novels teem with oddness, with dreamlike, vertiginous scenes

—— Lara Pawson , Times Literary Supplement

Levy's elegantly ludic investigation into selfhood, mother love and meaning

—— Guardian, '2023 Summer Reads'

Levy fans will delight in August Blue’s heady exploration of female creativity

—— Financial Times, 'Best Books of 2023'

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