The Canals of Mars

The Canals of Mars begins with a poem elegising the poet's father and welcoming his newborn son. It concludes with a moment in which everything 'is finished and about to happen'. Patrick McGuinness's poems in this powerful first collection sharply recreate the beauty and strangeness of inner landscapes. He reveals the fractal patterns within familiar structures: the tree within the leaf, the recurrence that unfolds to create a fugue, how common experience is rediscovered within the newly learnt words of a foreign language. A Welsh drystone wall is built of live air, an extinct Martian world mirrors human suffering, an ultrasound scan images a human baby as a luminous constellation.