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
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
