Tim Kendall reviews: The Canals of Mars by Patrick McGuinness

The title is a hostage to fortune. Patrick McGuinness teaches Francophone literature at Oxford - and his passing allusions often show the rewards of that scholarship - but his most conspicuous influence remains otherworldly. When in 'A View of Pasadena from the Road' McGuinness describes how 'a landscape of six-foot letters rewinds / in the tinted glass', he seems to remember the revelatory experiences of Craig Raine's famous Martian: 'Model T is a room with the lock inside-- / a key is turned to free the world // for movement, so quick there is a film / to watch for anything missed.' '[T]he shadowless earth / is as thirsty as Mars', McGuinness continues, nodding at a debt which reappears sporadically throughout this first collection. Elsewhere, the poet calls home on 'lobster telephones' (channelling the planetary influence through Dali), or (through Muldoon) admires the ultrasound image of his son: 'his skeleton a silver filament, / his body a bulb in a roomful of night' ('Ultrasound'). When McGuinness finds police stations 'foreign as spacecraft' ('No'), he hints that his poetry may be Martian in more ways than one.

Yet The Canals of Mars offers more than an impressionable earthling's postcards home. What inspires McGuinness most about Mars is not its poets but its barrenness: the title poem imagines Martians dying in 'a great drought', and although it briefly distracts itself to generate some pity for their 'pain', McGuinness's enthusiasm for that destiny cannot be repressed. He loves the dessicated, the deracinated, and the depopulated, as embodied in those characterless international - and vacant interstellar - spaces long since deserted by the spirit of place. Like the voice overheard in UN Square asking disdainfully, 'you think / you need to be somewhere?', McGuinness's poems would rather be anywhere than somewhere. They make their home in Belgium because it is 'the first post-national state' and most of its natives 'would have preferred to be from somewhere else'. 'A Border Town', 'Vague Terrain' - the titles gesture at places so indeterminate that they scarcely exist. 'The White Place' explores near- (or after-) death experiences, and fully understands the survivor's reluctance to return to the colours of life from so pure a destination. More specifically-located poems, such as 'Leuven', find that 'feelings drift by on their way elsewhere, / amble into view on a tide of vagueness'; and 'Mist in Palo Alto' indulges McGuinness's perfect fantasy, as climatic conditions shroud verifiable place. Headlamps, road signs and cat's eyes become barely visible, leading McGuinness's speaker to conclude that it is 'too late now / to turn back / to push on'. The excuse is convenient: in the blankness he has found his white place, his paradise.

None of this makes McGuinness a good or a bad poet, but it does already lift The Canals of Mars above the modish volumes which inevitably beat it onto shortlists. The poems flirt with Martianism because their self-appointed task is to interrogate the world's thisness. 'The real and the reflected / swap dimensions', McGuinness notes in 'Bruges', typifying a preoccupation with mirror-images and doublings; surfers are 'distorted in the wing mirror's / mannered version of themselves' ('Surfers in a Wing Mirror'); bards 'gaze at their faces mirrored in the sky' ('A Street in Naples'). 'A Street in Naples' risks something approaching a manifesto when it speaks of 'A real subject inhabiting imagined space'. McGuinness's source is Marianne Moore's definition of poetry as 'imaginary garden with real toads in it', and The Canals of Mars gives the impression that Moore is a poet from whom he should continue to learn. Yet for McGuinness the issue is handled with an idiosyncratic scepticism which augurs well for his next volume: how can we tell, his work constantly asks, whether the garden isn't real and the toads imaginary?

The Canals of Mars (Carcanet 2004), £6.95

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