With only the opening poem to hand we might deduce that McGuinness is fascinated by ‘between states’, by the way that […] a moment of disappearance can also be a moment of emergence. Several poem in the first third of The Canals of Mars do indeed deal with borders. The word gives the second poem of the book its title and ‘Vague Terrain’ deals with the ‘nether-country’ and ‘border/land’ where rubbish gets dumped. However, if w eread ‘Father and Son’ with the attention it demands, then it is clear that what fascinates McGuinness is the way moments of disappearance, of apparent nothingness, can be as important and as full of meaning as more tangible life events and the material world and its obstinate presences. […]

The Canals of Mars offers more than an impressionable earthling's postcards home. What inspires McGuinness most about Mars is not its poets but its barrenness: the title poem imagines Martians dying in 'a great drought', and although it briefly distracts itself to generate some pity for their 'pain', McGuinness's enthusiasm for that destiny cannot be repressed. He loves the dessicated, the deracinated, and the depopulated, as embodied in those characterless international - and vacant interstellar - spaces long since deserted by the spirit of place. Like the voice overheard in UN Square asking disdainfully, 'you think / you need to be somewhere?', McGuinness's poems would rather be anywhere than somewhere. They make their home in Belgium because it is 'the first post-national state' and most of its natives 'would have preferred to be from somewhere else'. 'A Border Town', 'Vague Terrain' - the titles gesture at places so indeterminate that they scarcely exist. 'The White Place' explores near- (or after-) death experiences, and fully understands the survivor's reluctance to return to the colours of life from so pure a destination. More specifically-located poems, such as 'Leuven', find that 'feelings drift by on their way elsewhere, / amble into view on a tide of vagueness'; and 'Mist in Palo Alto' indulges McGuinness's perfect fantasy, as climatic conditions shroud verifiable place. Headlamps, road signs and cat's eyes become barely visible, leading McGuinness's speaker to conclude that it is 'too late now / to turn back / to push on'. The excuse is convenient: in the blankness he has found his white place, his paradise.

Patrick McGuinness was born in Tunisia. He is half Belgian and half Irish by immediate descent. […] He is the partner of a Welsh-language novelist and he lives in Wales. There he is engaged in left-wing and nationalist politics but for a living he teaches French at Oxford, where he is a Fellow of St Anne’s. As a scholar he is an authority on ‘la poésie symboliste et décadente’, on the Belgian dramatist and poet Maeterlinck, on Mallarmé, and on international modernism. By any account he is an exotic (a very Belgian idea, as might not be widely suspected).

Given that its author is a Tunisian-born Belgian of Irish extraction who lives in Wales and lectures in England, and whose academic expertise is in French literature, it is perhaps not overly surprising that this extraordinary debut collection should be devoted to what Philip Larkin called ‘The Importance of Elsewhere’. Moving from Bruges to Bouillon, Palo Alto to Pont Aven, Mersey to Mars, Patrick McGuinness has constructed an atlas of displacement, a rough guide to a lonely planet, full of unquenchable cultural curiosity and irresistible ironies. Pointing out that ‘surveys showed that most Belgians questioned / would have preferred to be from somewhere else’, McGuiness muses with enviable verve in his poem ‘Belgitude’, that ‘truly this was home’.