# Blood Feather

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/patrick-mcguinness/blood-feather/9780224098311

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![Blood Feather](https://quivercdn.com/covers/jonathan-cape/patrick-mcguinness/blood-feather_978-02-2409-831-1.jpg?v=2026-04-24%2010%3A24%3A10)

- Book: [Blood Feather](https://www.bookquiver.com/patrick-mcguinness/blood-feather) ([Blood Feather.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/patrick-mcguinness/blood-feather.md))
- Authors: [Patrick McGuinness](https://www.bookquiver.com/patrick-mcguinness)
- Publisher: Jonathan Cape
- ISBN: 978-02-2409-831-1
- Pages: 80
- Published: 2023-05-04
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

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 .