Excerpts from the Memoirs of a Fool

Excerpts from the Memoirs of a Fool
Published by Carcanet on 27th January 2001

Patrick Mackie's debut collection explores the poet's foolishness in forms which are lucid, wry, at times conversational and always beguiling. There are love poems, meditations, narrative snapsnots, real and imagined landscapes, and encounters with anyone from Paul Klee to the Devil. Mackie acknowledges debts to Wallace Stevens, French Surrealism and Goethe, amongst others, but such debts do not obscure the emergence of a unique poetic talent that is pitched between lyricism, Modernism and the comic.