Jilted City by Patrick McGuinness

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I liked the short, two line, poem Déjà-vu

Forgotten as it happens, recalled before it has begun:

two tenses grappling with one instance, one perception.

Another poem – House Clearance

Turn the key: note how the emptiness accumulates

as you come in; how by being here at all you seem to add to it,

until it fills the corridor with that fermented stasis

you both disturb and add to as you move. Pass

through a second door, a portal of stirred air,

ignore the rooms to left and right and take the stairs,

you shoes dislodging dust that billows

up in tiny detonations. You’re walking underwater,

the silt explodes beneath your feet; at first you think you’ll drown

but what’s flashing though your mind in one

slow-motion scattering of greys is not your own life but theirs.

No matter that you still can’t breathe – that’s how it’s always

been in here: even the nothingness is think as blotting paper

on which their shapes have spread like ink – must, damp.

The outline of a body sketched in mothballs and almost-

memory. The furniture is ghostly beneath the sheets

but the missing pictures are still there, outlined

in frames of dirt on squares of wall now white as bone

surprised beneath the skin. You were in every one of them.

Now you’re last flame in the grate:

Hamlet in his theatre of shadows, their embers at your feet.

This collection includes translation Liviu Campanu’s City of Lost Walks which reflects on his exile from Bucharest – and this poem seemed to speak to some of the experience of COVID-19 Lockdown – an extract

…

And what I complain most about is that it’s not exactly

suffering, not quiet extremity, but rather fretting

at tedium’s hem, picking myself apart remembering

...