A winner in The Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition 2006

Patrick McGuinness was born in Tunisia in 1968, and now teaches French at Oxford University, where he is Reader in French and Comparative Literature and a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. His first book of poems, The Canals of Mars, was published by Carcanet in 2004. His translation of Mallarmé’s For Anatole’s Tomb (2003) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

‘These beautifully wrought poems are meditations on time. Whatever the subject Patrick McGuinness captures that sense, as he so brilliantly puts it, that “Somewhere the Angel of Oblivion, radiant, leans his face into the wind/that turns our pages.”’ – Vicki Feaver

‘McGuinness translates from French … and perhaps that accounts for the different acoustic of his poetry: it’s quite unlike the work of any other British poet we know, haunting, delicate and exact in [its] observations.’ – Justin Quinn, Metre