The Canals of Mars is an excellent first volume. […] What McGuinness is good at is writing about the point where mystery (not here given a religious dimension) impinges on the everyday, as in `Short Life of a Thought’:

…it doesn’t yet exist,

being a thought unhad, a memory

of something not yet known.

The paradox is presented in low-key manner; it would not be right to describe these poems as uncertain. On the contrary, McGuinness, a lecturer in French and so, perhaps, inured to le néant, is very sure of himself in a world that slips from him at every moment. Dissemination is wonderfully called up: `events’ that `break,/ like light, into those particles of dust that spin/ and settle back in layers on what they lit.’ The collection is not a perfect unity, but that is an over-rated form of success; it holds one’s attention throughout.