Paul Magee

When I sit down to write this review on a snowy morning during a ten-day trip to upstate New York, are the words I write pre-planned, is the shape of this piece clear in my head, or is it all coming to me as I place my fingers on the keyboard and grapple with the symbols appearing on the screen? Are the words you are reading at this moment the words that I originally wrote on a Northern Hemisphere winter’s morning, or have they been revised, rethought, planned anew. 

In ‘Painting’s Flatness’, Paul Magee ruefully observes the following: ‘If only surfaces were possible / here in the imagination / just to walk and to touch sincerely the ground.’ This, as the title of the poetry collection suggests, is the essence of Stone Postcard: a poet’s search for stability in the face of exquisite and inscrutable change.

Paul Magee’s first book, Cube Root of Book, digs through the roots of life. He revisits past incidents, examining what draws him to poetry. Magee’s accurate translations from Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Catullus, interspersed throughout, heighten his subject matter but contrast with his own less proven work. Yet these translations draw attention to his fragmented, deracinated modern life, apparent in the various styles he employs, from the explanatory and prose-like to the chopped expostulations of love or lament. Some translations are playful – ‘Sleep embraced their weary limbs … and I looked up the word for patefactus’ (‘Aeneid II’) – while others superimpose order, as in ‘Mr Ruddock’s speechwriter (Philippic 1)’: ‘The asylum in the desert swallows the phrase, a throat / a drain with birds circling, a gate.’