Soon after the death of his father, James Joyce wrote “Ecce Puer”, a short poem linking the leavetaking of the eldest Joyce with the arrival of the author’s grandson, Stephen. It closes theatrically: “A child is sleeping, / An old man gone. / Oh, father forsaken, / Forgive your son!” Written “in memory of my father, and in welcome to my son”, the opening poem in Patrick McGuinness’s debut collection is a studied variation on Joyce’s theme: “In the wings there is one who waits to go on / and another, his scene run, who waits to go”. The poet imagines their two souls meeting “like crossed letters touching in the dark; // the blank page and the turned page, / the first and the last, shadows folding // over and across me, in whom they’re bound”. The natural wholesomeness of the old making room for the new comes as a stark contrast to McGuinness’s recent translation of Mallarmé’s For Anatole’s Tomb (reviewed in the TLS, March 19), a pile of grief stricken fragments written after the death of Mallarmé’s only son. The one example of these to surface in The Canals of Mars is a chilling séance with death itself, who “whispers softly”: “As for the others, for the living, / their mourning, etc., / that is just my shadow clothing them in black”.

No lack of confidence hinders Patrick McGuinness’s first collection […] Formally and thematically diverse, McGuinness reinvents himself several times in the course of the book, becoming at one point a Glaswegian Rimbaud, at another a lyricist of the here-and-now slightly reminiscent of Gary Snyder, then a sombre Ulster poet… […] It will be interesting to see which, if any, of his poetic selves McGuinness decides to commit himself to. In the meantime, The Canals of Mars is a vigorous, enjoyable beginning.

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.