With only the opening poem to hand we might deduce that McGuinness is fascinated by ‘between states’, by the way that […] a moment of disappearance can also be a moment of emergence. Several poem in the first third of The Canals of Mars do indeed deal with borders. The word gives the second poem of the book its title and ‘Vague Terrain’ deals with the ‘nether-country’ and ‘border/land’ where rubbish gets dumped. However, if w eread ‘Father and Son’ with the attention it demands, then it is clear that what fascinates McGuinness is the way moments of disappearance, of apparent nothingness, can be as important and as full of meaning as more tangible life events and the material world and its obstinate presences. […]

McGuinness has published notable translations of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mallarmé’s For Anatole’s Tomb. As this underlines, The Canals of Mars is partly concerned to update Symbolism for the twenty-first century… if absence is at the heart of representation then poetry is inevitably a work of consolation. Read back into the rest of the collection and McGuinness’s rigorous seoundings of absence, the implication is that this does not mean that poems should have purposes or offer explanations before they have poetry.