Poem
Patrick McGuinness
The Belgiad
The Belgiad
The Belgiad
Caesarean state:every roadsign a mirror
every town a suburb
*
Magritte’s Saturn: all rings and no planet
the ever-provisional
coastline dreaming of the sea
*
Maigret’s Liège stands in for itself
its anonymous crimes
sweepings from the poorhouse floor
Charleroi’s slow factories turn like the Ferris
wheel in The Third Man
*
Louvain, Gand, Anvers
river-cities face to face with themselves
Leuven, Gent, Antwerpen
Bruges one long aftermath, held breath
*
Bouillon to Blankenberg,
Martelange to Knokke
300 kilometres of frontier
united and untied
*
From the citadel of Namur, Baudelaire’s Paris
appears in a cityscape by Rops: France doubled,
doubly not. The Meuse rolls through
as many names as it has valleys to run dry in.
*
All has that faint emphasis, as if the place were in italics,
could look like elsewhere yet be nowhere else.
© 2004, Patrick McGuinness
From: The Canals of Mars
Publisher: Carcanet, Manchester
From: The Canals of Mars
Publisher: Carcanet, Manchester
Patrick McGuinness
(Tunisia, 1968)
Patrick McGuinness is a poet, novelist, translator and academic, a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, where he has taught since 1998. He lives in North West Wales. His poetry, published by Carcanet, has won an Eric Gregory Award, the American Poetry Foundations Levinson Prize in 2003, the Poetry Business Prize in 2006, ...
Poems
Poems of Patrick McGuinness
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The Belgiad
Caesarean state:every roadsign a mirror
every town a suburb
*
Magritte’s Saturn: all rings and no planet
the ever-provisional
coastline dreaming of the sea
*
Maigret’s Liège stands in for itself
its anonymous crimes
sweepings from the poorhouse floor
Charleroi’s slow factories turn like the Ferris
wheel in The Third Man
*
Louvain, Gand, Anvers
river-cities face to face with themselves
Leuven, Gent, Antwerpen
Bruges one long aftermath, held breath
*
Bouillon to Blankenberg,
Martelange to Knokke
300 kilometres of frontier
united and untied
*
From the citadel of Namur, Baudelaire’s Paris
appears in a cityscape by Rops: France doubled,
doubly not. The Meuse rolls through
as many names as it has valleys to run dry in.
*
All has that faint emphasis, as if the place were in italics,
could look like elsewhere yet be nowhere else.
From: The Canals of Mars
The Belgiad
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