Jilted City

The poems in Jilted City inhabit in-between-places, when a border is being crossed, a word is slipping into another language, when memory is translating loss. From 'Stations where the train doesn't stop' in 'Blue Guide', following a train journey through Belgium, to'City of Lost Walks', English versions of a dissident Romanian poet whose 'poetry fails to register except in the form of an omission', McGuinness explores transition and translation, the afterlife of absences. Wit and paradox are at the heart of a collection that finds unforeseen connections between place and displacement.

Running through Jilted City is an acrid tenderness that is entirely itself, its jokes dry, aching with loss. - George Szirtes

Cover image: Alun Hemming, Urban Vulture. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. Cover design StephenRaw.com