Andrew McNeillie,  A Wild Goose Chase (Carcanet, 2026)

A Wild Goose Chase is a creative reflection on a life in and through poetry. Its geographies cover the wider British archipelago and include McNeillie’s native North Wales as it takes in a range of Celtic heritages and topographies, many of them coastal or maritime. Though spliced with a sense of more ancient history including that of Pytheas, a fourth-century Greek who explored Britain and wrote a now lost account of it, McNeillie’s own memories and experiences form the dominant ground in the collection. This conjunction of time, place, and memory might suggest William Wordsworth, but if so it is the Wordsworth who occasionally calls into question the straightforward veracity of memory as imagination. Here, McNeillie has the wisdom and assurance to revel creatively in the new-found liberty of old age in which time and place continue to be important presences, but are now more fluid in nature. As its title indicates, this is a book which recognises the impossibility of straightforward origins and  which finds creative inspiration in the seemingly wayward, weaving flight of wild geese.

The first and last poems of the collection, ‘A Window of Rain’ and ‘Unlooked For’, capture the volume’s capacity to offer poems of relaxed lyrical ease and lucidity. Both poems mix the serendipity of the everyday with a deft handling of last things. Both are beguilingly simple in their diction while capturing the complexity of the book’s engagement with the relationship between mind and place.

In ‘A Window of Rain’ ...