Patrick McGuinness

In a shrewd and sympathetic essay on Dylan Thomas published in The Redress of Poetry, Seamus Heaney found a memorable set of metaphors for Thomas’s poetic procedures: he ‘plunged into the sump of his teenage self, filling his notebooks with druggy, bewildering lines that would be a kind of fossil fuel to him for years to come . . . Thomas had to be toiling in the element...

One house next next again pert green lawn white garage sprinkler muted

nothing out of order no thing untoward

wraparound sound, sigh

of fridge door

city tightening

the mountains seem not to move have texture

pavement empty, road adrift, the car shining safely the neighbour hood coming to a slow

coming to a rolling boil

The police stations seamless, riveted and sealed, foreign as...

child sprung from us both – showing us our ideal, the way – to us! father and mother who in sad existence survive him, like the two extremes – ill-matched in him and sundered from each other – whence his death – abolishing this little child ‘self’

sick in the springtime dead in the autumn – it’s the sun

the wave idea the cough 2)

son...

The size and variety of Victor Hugo’s oeuvre – around 200,000 lines of verse, plus dozens of novels, plays and critical works – makes it difficult to get an overview, let alone make a selection. In his Hugoliade, Ionesco suggested that Hugo’s best chance of survival lay in the impossibility of reading everything he’d written. But no other French poet has had such...

after the 14th-century Flemish

Form and form-giver, light and light-bearer, mistaken for air, for light by the eye, flies wingless, lighter than what it bears

Stored in the eye, makes sight substance, guides the pen, the brush, thickens dimensions; shorelines hinge on it, feathers aspire to it

Form and form-giver, translates the sun a bauble turns it and turns in it leaves coil in it, shine...