Not quite a stop but neither are we merely passing through –
a kind of sticky pause like fighting a magnetic field
and wanting it to win. A few kilometres across the border,

the change in language comes like a switch in current,
a switch in currency.

                                                 from 'Kleinbettingen'

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

Contents
I
Déjà-vu
Blue
The Age of the Empty Chair
Noon at the DoubleTree Hotel
The Shape of Nothing Happening
French
Le Grand Pardon
[Untitled]
The Companions
Nineteenth-Century Blues
Charleville
Black Box

II Blue Guide
I Gare du Nord
II Gare centrale
III Gare du Midi
IV Quartier-Léopold
V Schuman
VI Bruxelles-Luxembourg
VII Ottignies
VIII Gembloux
Correspondances
IX Namur
X Ciney
XI Marloie
XII Jemelle
XIII Libramont
XIV Bouillon
XV Marbehan
XVI Arlon
Kleinbettingen
XVII Luxembourg
Stations where the train doesn’t stop

III
My Mother
L’Air du Temps
The Other Side
Montréal
Daytime Drinking
Lists
Spleen: Cardiff Matchday Blues
The Thaw
I Illegible waves of wood
II Lapland
III ! ! !
IV Stills
V writing the words
VI LO! v e
i.m. Jacques Brel (1929-1978)
Article 0.5: The Right to Be In-Between
Poem in White Ink
The Empty Frame
House Clearance
The Clamour
Déjà-vu

IV City of Lost Walks: Poems by Liviu Campanu
from The Ovid Complex (1989)
Poems I–VIII
Scenarios for Lovers and Magnets
from City of Lost Walks (1985)
In the Natural History Museum
In the Museum of Archaeology

Notes