Medbh McGuckian

[ top ]

[ top ]

[ top ]

Maureen Ruprecht Fadem, Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian (NY: Rowan & Littlefield 2019), 310pp. CONTENTS. Foreword: Reckoning With (Women’s) Silence(s): The Work of Poetry; Chapter 1: Home Is Where the Border Is: The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian; Introduction, Part I : Poetics of Silence: Language, Image, Voice; Chapter 2: Silence - Speaking: The Secret-Spoken Language of Partition; Chapter 3: Text / Image: Ut pictura poïesis; Chapter 4: Textuality / Intertextuality: Embedded Contingencies and the Tyranny of (Postcolonial) Comparativity; Introduction, Part II: Economies of Speaking: Production, Consumption, Conjuring; Chapter 5: Poïesis / Poïema: “Deep in your snow”: Coming to Be Located ; Chapter 6: Privated / Worlded: “Absolutely not hermetic”: Iterations of Silence and the Borders of Articulacy; Afterword: History / Prosody: The Poet as Conjure Artist. (See under Notes - infra.)

Commentary
Clair Wills, ‘The Perfect Mother: Authority in the Poetry of Mebdh McGuckian’, in Text and Context, 3 (Autumn 1988), p.109: ‘McGuckian seems to wish to set up a new symbolic order, a “less official” faith which she can follow. In order to create this new symbolic order she takes on the role of both mother and priest.’ (Quoted in Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994, p.53.)

Clair Wills, ‘Voices from the Nursery: Medbh McGuckian’s Plantation’, in Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature, Michael Kenneally (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1995): ‘To take her place in an Irish poetic tradition in some senses “enabled” by the troping of motherhood as a public image, [she] must “divert” the tradition through the “domestic”, since the discourse of sexuality is the only “public” language to which, as a woman writer, she had legitimate access.’ (p.375.)

Thomas Docherty, ‘Initiations, Tempers, Seductions, Postmodern McGuckian’, in Neil Corcoran, ed., The Chosen Ground:Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland (Bridgend: Seren Books 1992), pp.191-210: collocated her poetic with Deleuze, and emphasises her reliance on dictionary reading; ‘One might immediately be tempted to think of On Ballycastle Beach (1988) as McGuckian’s North, for its title refers to a geographical location at one of the northernmost points of Ireland, in County Antrim. But once again, if the reader searches here for the kind of explicit or mythic politics found in other contemporary Irish poets, she or he will be disappointed. These poems are organised around a “French-born” idea, le temps perdu. Temps, meaning both time and weather, allows McGuckian a trope which organises poems obsessed with seasonal change. Here, it is as if the rituals which interest her are the pagan rites which have been latent in all her writing. There is also here a governing figure of “seduction” or temptation [sic], as if the texts were written by a Lilith figure, and as if the texts were an attempt, or essay, at constructing a literary lineage deriving from Eve and her apples.’ (p.193); ‘[…] if one were to look for precedessors for McGuckian, it would be an error to search among the Irish poets of the twentieth century. In terms of linguistic styles, she has more in common with both nineteenth-century decadence and with twentieth -century surrealism, both internationalist movements. Much of her imagery could be derived from Neruda or Aragon rather than Clarke or Kavanagh. Yet there is one way in which she overlaps with a thematics of flight which dominates much Irish writing in this century’ [going on to cite Yeats and Heaney] (p.207); ‘Her sentences meander from étrangeté to bizarrerie, dislocating metaphor and being “easily carried away” in this language which is dictated by no consciousness, and leaving a reader stranded in flight from multivalent realities.’ (p.209).

Marion Lomax, ‘Gendered Writing and the Writer’s Stylistic Identity’, in Katie Wales, ed., Feminist Linguistics in Literary Criticism [for the English Association; Gen. Ed., D. S. Brewer] (Essays & Studies 1994), pp.1-19, incl. comments on McGuckian: ‘Much of the poetry of the Northern Irish poet, Medbh McGuckian, for example, would seem to be based on elements which Kristeva identifies. Yet, when a writer appears to be in line with a theory it is easy (and would be unwise) to forget that the writer’s own, individual needs came first.’ Cites Blake Morrison: ‘Her poetry is rhapsodic in its rhythms and often surrealistic in its imagery - describing what it means is never very easy’ (‘Contemp. Poets’, Independent on Sunday, 11 April 1993, p.34); continues: ‘Perhaps this is because the non-signifying processes have become part of the meaning.//McGuckian strives to articulate ideas which resist definition in the usual way - depths and nuances of emotion, spirituality - so her style is likely to stem directly from the need to find a powerful means of expression in specific instances and would not, then, spring from a conscious effort on her art to adopt a particular writing mode’; adds commentary on the poem “Field Heart” [printed on the same page]; ends comments on McGuckian: ‘in the case of Irish writers in English and others who have a complex linguistic heritage, what Kristeva calls traces of the semiotic may also be associated with features of a buried mother tongue.’ (pp.6-8).

Naoko Toraiwa, ‘Translation as an Exit: Medbh McGuckian’s On Ballycastle Beach’, in Journal of Irish Studies [IASIL-Japan], XVII (2002), pp.34-47, ‘explores the possibility that [the] desire for exit is connected to the fact that since the mid-1980s, the worek of translation has been growing in Ireland’ and looks in particular at McGuckian’s translation reading of […] Marina Tsvetsaeva’, arguing ‘that it is intimeatley connected with her nightmarish search for an exit from the intolerable conditions of her third book.’ Toraiwa notes verbal echoes of Tsvetaeva’s letters to Pasternak and quotes extensively from “Little House, Big House” (On Ballycastle Beach, p.32; paper delivered at IASIL International Conference, DCU, July 2001).

Maureen Ruprecht Fadem, ‘Outling Silence in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian’, in The Literature of Northern Ireland: Spectral Borderlands (London & NY: Palgrave 2015), pp.99-135 [Chap. 3]:
....
pp.99-100 available at Palgrave - online accessed 28.09.2020.
—See also Michele Holmgren, review of Maureen Ruprecht Fadem Fadem, The Literature of Northern Ireland: Spectral Borderlands (London & NY: Palgrave 2015), in Ariel: Review of International English Literature(Jan.-April 2016), 402-04; available at ResearchGate [online] & Questia [online]; accessed 28.09.2020.

[ top ]

Reviews
Eamon Grennan, review in Poetry Ireland Review, No. 46 (1995), writes: ‘McGuckian’s poems are as expressive of their fractured environment in as full and as complex a way … as are the poems of Carson and Muldoon and Heaney and Mahon.’ (p.116.)

Maurice Harmon reviews The Brazen Serpent, with other poets and collections, in ‘Writing for the Gallery’, Books Ireland (Oct. 1995), and examines a poem, ‘We learn, in short, to trust the images, not to resist just because of worries about inaccuracy or apparent inappropriateness. Indeed we begin to appreciate a way of writing that makes images and metaphors slightly askew. We cannot take things for granted and this is one of McGuckian’s strengths.’ (Books Ireland, Oct. 1995, p.250.)

Kathy Cremin [Centre for Women’s Studies, York Univ.], reviews Venus and the Rain, On Ballycastle Beach, and Captain Lavender [Gallery Press; dates resp. 1994, 1995, and 1994 [sic], in Irish Studies Review (Spring 1996), 48-50; Captain Lavender a personal and political meditation on death; unusually politically forthright [‘the flowers I picked were a bloodstream/I was standing in’]; McGuckian takes the notion of a secret political organisation and feminises it, clearly signalling her intention of sexualising narratives of Irish political life; ‘sperm names, ovum names, pushed inside /each other. We are half-taught/our real names, from other lives’; major thematic shift in Captain Lavender; Venus and the Rain focuses on maternity and marriage as locations for female fertility and creativity; Ballycastle Beach goes beyond these boundaries to explore other lineages and kinships; with Lavender she returns to emphasise the importance of the parent, this time the father; engages in an inverse subject-position, that of the grieving daughter, and throughout this volume everything has become inverted; as in ‘Black Virgin’ [where] dead father becomes a virgin, then a baby, and through whom the poet ‘a military railway’, learns sight and sound [&c.]

Oonagh Warke, reviewing [Shelmalier] in Books Ireland (May 1998), find that the lines in “The Aisling Hat”, for all that she sometimes has inklings as to what the poem is conveying, ‘leave me more bewildered than enlightened’ [quotes]: ‘Over your face a cognac eagleskin / was tightly stretched, my cart-horse, / dray-horse, drew your heavy chariot / chasing after time you beat aloud / which had already vanished into overtones: you were his so-discoverer, his museum […]’ (Books Ireland, p.128f.)

Caitriona Cluterbuck, ‘Watchful as a Lighthouse’, review of Medbh McGuckian, Selected Poems (Gallery 1997), in The Irish Review (Summer 1998), pp.179-78: ‘McGuckian’s sensitivity to the desire for coherence in Irish culture in a chief attribute of her work. her own poetry has fast become a local focus of this desire for stability, which underlies Irish lip-service to the benefits of stabiity. Withint the contemporary canon, a tradition of McGuckian criticism has developed whereby her work is treated as an elaborate version of semantic “I spy”, in which victory has permaturely been claimed by women, or particularly deterministic male critics, but which no-one can really win. Thus her poetry is subtly discounted by being diagnosed as the material of intriguing but ultimately dissatisfying game playing. But the assumption that McGuckian’s focus is on either the truth (feminine or [178] otherwise) or its absence, is an under-reading of the self-reflexive strategies of her poetry - instead her focus is on the processes of arriving at truth. / Meaning in a McGuckian poem, as the critic Clair Wills has authoritatively argued, comes about as an irregular and unpredictable unfolding where each element is capable of catalysing or giving birth to its fellow. This technical strategy has important implications in the context of Northern Ireland: it is possible to read the underlying principle of her poetry as being the that identity is not so much permitted or suppressed by another, as it is inevitably released from inside that other and vice versa. [… &c.]’

Catriona O’Reilly, reviewing Shelmalier (1999) in The Irish Times [Jan. 30th 1999], writes: ‘McGuckian’s themes are frequently lost in the self-conscious gorgeousness of her constructions: expressions about 1798 or present-day political strife run the risk of begin too personalised to interest the reader, and her amorphous metaphoricity can lead to some iunintenionally ludicrous effects […] There are moments of utter impenetrability and grammatical sloppiness, as from this stanza from “The Feastday of Peace”: “Their lace-curtain Irish / anchoring the moon-lines / along the twisted sea-coast / chafes like a boat / in a sky-voyage the English meaning so unlike language.” One is hard pressed to know exactly what McGuckian is on about here. [… &c.]’; also speaks of the phrase ‘a meanic sky anastomoses’ in “Using the Cushion” as ‘an incongruous and pretentious obstacle to understanding in this short lyric’ which ‘send[s] her readers scurrying to their dictionaries’.

Fred Johnston, reviewing Shelmalier, in Books Ireland (April 1999), p.94: quotes intro., ‘I owe the idea of this book to Jane Leonard, of the Ulster Museum, who suggested that I should read up on the 1798 Rebellion with a view to writing a poem about it … I found that what I had writen in the form of epitaph and commemoration or address for the present-day disturbances in the North fitted like an egg into its shell that previous whirlwind moment when, unbelievably, hope and history did in fact rhyme.’ The review concludes, ‘in the end I’m not sure that any fruitful comparisons, poetic or otherwise, can be drawn between the events of 1798 and those of more recent years however scrupulous or intelligently devised.’

Fred Johnston, reviewing McGuckian, Venus and the Rain (Gallery reiss. 2001) [‘revised’], in Books Ireland (Sept. 2001), questions whether the poetry is not sometimes obscure: ‘I do believe - though it may be sensibly argued that we don’t always have to know what a poem means ot enjoy it - that it quite often rambles, in love with its own sound, like someone overheard out for a walk humming a tune whose sens eone can only guess at as one passes by. Pleasing to the hummer, surely; to the listener unfathomable.’ Quotes with approbation: ‘He could not leave his own voice alone; / He took it apart, he undressed it, / I suppose the way that women clear their faces, / So that some light is still able to love them.’ Asks: ‘Do we consider McGuckian to be a sensuous poet. I think we should […]’ (p.215.)

Fred Johnston, ‘No Intellectual Tradition’, review of The Book of the Angel [with works of other poets], in Books Ireland (March 2005), p.51: cites the blurp’ contention that the poem deals with Agape and Eros from ‘the millenial standpoint to contemplate the eternally unfathomable mystery of Incarnation’. ‘[…] This approaches the nature of music and departs form the nature of language. McGuckian seems to have shut her eyes and imaged word-images without direction, thought-processes juiced into language, a kind of automatic writing. […] Having said that, her thickly layered imaginative cvoice is unique in Irish poetry, and it is not enough merely to dismiss it on the ground that one doesn’t immediately comprehend it. [Compares McGuckian’s poems to paintings of Louis le Brocquy and quotes his dictum, ‘art is neither an instrument nor a convenience, but a secret logic of the imagination.’] / mcGuckian’s meanings are often consummately personal. When that happens in poetry, when a poet writes in tonguees only he or she can decipher, he needs must end up talking to himself.’ Criticises several passages for ’dreadfully clumsy’ choice of words and exempts title-poem (“Angel with Blue Wings”: ‘Oversoft your eye, your hand/the heldness and stillness/of your seated step,/fingerprints and palmprints large/against a body felt as pale/in the first stages of resurrection.’): ‘[…] the poem is about transcendence and works because it doesn’t try to heard to make us state into a kaleidoscope to see a sunset. Essentially this is a strong enough McGuckian collection, a spiritual poom perhaps in the way any poet endeavours to understand the term and strive towards it to escape the ordinary.’

[ top ]

Nuala Ní Dhomnaill ‘explains who she picked, and why’ (feature-article on Duffy & Dorgan, eds., Watching the River Flow: A Century of Irish Poetry [anthology], in The Irish Times, Weekend, 27 Nov. 1999): quotes Ciaran Carson on McGuckian: ‘There is no one like McGuckian writing in the English language, and we should be grateful for her ornate and ambiguous presence. Too often, I have been asked, “But what does it all mean?” You might as well ask what Charlie Parker “means”. He means music. McGuckian means poetry and as she put is it Shelmalier, “This great estrangement has the destiny of a rhyme.” (Verse, Vol. 16, No. 2).

Nessa O’Mahony, ‘From colour-coded messages to skilful portraits’, review of The Currach Requires No Harbours [et al.] (14 April 2007), Weekend Review, p.12. ‘[…] The experience of reading Medbh McGuckian’s poetry can be somewhat like that [i.e., viewing work by Kandinsky, who ‘developed his theory that colour could stimulate emotion in the same way that classical music could’ - creating a response that was ‘visceral rather than intellectual’.] She is a writer who creates images of haunting beauty using language that resists easy interpretation. She herself has described her technique as “like embroidery”. In a 1990 interview with Rebecca Wilson she said: “I take an assortment of words, though not exactly at random, and I fuse them”; her latest collection, The Currach Requires No Harbours, once again offers the reader a work of richly confusing threads. / So what can the reader use to navigate her way into the poems? Colour, for one. The critic Peggy O’Brien has called McGuckian’s use of colour “a readable shorthand”, and here the poet continues to use colour as a type of private code. Most of the poems in this collection refer to various hues, with blue a recurring tint; in “Catherine’s Blue” we read of the “shell-covered eyes, eaten up / by the blue that marked a local saint”; there is the “coal-derived blues” of “Bleu de Paris” or the “false blue” in “The Wrens of the Curragh”. There is, in fact, an entire and often startling spectrum, from the “lime / and red” of “My Must” and the “pearl-grey/ wood the sea throws up on beaches” in “Three Legged Angel” to the “brown-violet sea” of “Medieval Scriptorium”. /The recurrence of colour, along with images of angels, haloes, sculptures and religious artefacts contained in these poems, reassures the reader that there is some pattern here, some overall meaning to be wrested from the gorgeous if opaque language. As with the abstractions of Kandinsky, we must trust the mood evoked by the arrangement of words on the page rather than strain after their meaning.’ (See full text in RICORSO Library, "Criticism > Reviews", via index or direct.)

Moynagh Sullivan on “On Her Second Birthday” by Medbh McGuckian, in Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies [Special Irish Poetry Issue, guest ed. Peter Denman] (Sept. 2009), pp.320-32 [opening]: ‘Medbh McGuckian’s beautiful poetry has many fine readers, but the presence of maternal jouissance in her earlier writing often produced accusations of wilful obscurity, or glowing critiques that nonetheless have circled around the averred unknowability of her work. Multiple vertices of being, with competing energies and impulses, produce a powerful affect that is commonly understood by critics as fostering impenetrability as an end in itself. Even many of her most admiring critics seem resigned that mystification, evasiveness, and converse currents are part of the poetry’s magic, but not its meaning. The poet-critic, Justin Quinn, who has himself advanced convincing arguments about the relevance of McGuckian’s work, has noted that, ‘two generations of critics have been baffled by her poetry and are uncertain of its subject on a simple denotative level’. At least one reader who has resisted the temptation to mystify McGuckian’s poetry is the critic, Guinn Batten, who remains one of her most incisive commentators. Writing about McGuckian’s, “On her Second Birthday”, Batten reads the poem as written in the voice of the daughter and argues that it complicates the use of woman as a cipher for nation and spirit though a process of embodiment, when ‘figuration [...] becomes matter or body.’ Choosing ‘On Her Second Birthday’, as a poem that literally ‘matters’, I take my cue from some of Batten’s more tantalizing observations and consider the possibility of a lyrical I in which voice proceeds from both mother and daughter in concord and contrapuntal cleavage at a time that Batten suggests seems to ‘precede bodily birth’. Julia Kristeva’s proposal that ‘if pregnancy is a threshold between nature and culture, then maternity is a bridge between singularity and ethics’, opens up the possibility of thinking through a dyadic prism about the co-being of mother and child in this poem as they share the mother’s body and the psychic horizon of poetry. [For ref. notes omitted here; available in JSTOR - online; accessed 22.10.2016.0

[ top ]

Quotations
“The Flitting”: ‘You wouldn’t believe what this house has cost me - / In body language terms, it has turned me upside down. / I’ve been carried from one structure to another / On a chair of human arms […]’ (Rep. in Confounded Language, 1991).

“The Seed-Picture”: ‘Her hair / Is made of hook-shaped marigold, gold / Of pleasure for her lips, like raspberry grain. / The eylids oatmeal, the irises / Of Dutch blue may, black rape / For the pupils, millet / For the vicious beige circles underneath. / the single pearl barley / That sleeps around her dullness / Till it catches light, makes women / Feel their age, and sign for liberation.’ (In Patrick Crotty, ed., Modern Irish Poetry, 1991; quoted in Jennifer Hardy, UG Essay, UUC 2003.)

“The Sitting”: ‘As a woman’s touch makes curtains blossom / Permanently in a house: she calls it / Wishfulness, the failure of the tampering rain / To go right into the mountain, she prefers / My sea-studies, and will not sit for me / Again, something half-opened, rarer / Than railroads, a soiled red-letter day.’ (In Patrick Crotty, ed., Modern Irish Poetry, 1991, p.333; quoted in Jennifer Hardy, UG Essay, UUC 2003.)

[ top ]

[Marian poem]: ‘The sky suffers cloudmarks. / A patch of green lining / Turned up over her foot / takes shade from the room. // Her timeless, robe with its pomegranate / Motif, has a calmer fold pattern / Than the escaped piece of veil / Falling forward over her hair. // The red angels are sorrowing / At the nuptial meaning of her body / In their angelic time, the highest / taking a burning coal in his hand, // With intended highlights on his raised / Arms and red collar, the lowest / Holding a cdridle for the dying / With a coin, a curve in his sleeve. // All earthly things have died for her, / The silver choir lights in the porch / Setting the snowflake pattern / On the bedcover, in the bright stable.’ (The Irish Times, Weekend, 14 Dec. 2002.)

Comhrá [interview,] in The Southern Review, 31, 3 (1995): ‘I find most valuable and authoentic is Nuala’s [Ní Dhomhnaill] relationship to nature. Nature is part of this Platonic deal for Heaney and others. But Nuala is the only poet in the world, except for Tsvetaeva, whom we both sort of discovered as a kind of … [P]rerunner, yes, who has the same dynamism and the smae feeling of being at one with the world.’ (pp.598-99.) ‘I feel I don’t love the language enough […] Because it’s an imposed language, you see, and although it’s my mother tongue and my own way of communicating, I’m fighting with it all the time.’ (p.605.) ‘at some level I am reject them [English words], at some level I‘ ’m saying get out of my country, or get out of my […] me. Get away, and give me these Ó Rathailles and all these people that I’ve no immediate intercourse with.’ (p.606.)

María Jesús Lorenzo Modia, ‘An Interview with McGuckian’ in The European English Messenger, Autumn 2004), pp.35-43; On encounters with Republican prisoners, 1992-94, ‘So it was very interesting to talk to them, and to realise that they have lots of reasons behind all this. Also that they felt very much that the newspapers and the media had distorted everything that happened all the way through so that they were blackened. This made me very sceptical about everything that I would read or hear, which before 1 had always, you know. Nowadays, if they say there ninety people have died of SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome] and in my head I think that’s just a news item. I mean there may be nine thousand people, or there may be nine, or there may be none. Because it is now, honestly, that I have no proof of that. Or even when the Americans say we’re going in to bomb Iraq because Saddam is the villain, these men taught me to say: “Who’s the villain? Is Saddam the villain? Or is America the villain?[”] So, before this time I always accepted that the person in power was always the person with morality and truth on his side. But now I just assume that the person in power is corrupt. / This is something that I should have learnt long ago. But my nature is such that I hadn’t. And I was writing poems about other things. I was writing poems about … I don’t know, about my family, about … very personal things, maybe not about the world as they saw it, but about the world as I saw it. I was in a very, very feminine world. I was in a very sheltered world. Black was black. And they taught me that, no, black is always white, that black is never black, it’s almost the reverse. So, that’s a huge change, and now I am now a little bit sceptical about that because I think I accepted too much. I accepted too much that they were right.’ (p.38.)

[ top ]

María Jesús Lorenzo Modia, (interview, in The European English Messenger, Autumn 2004, 2004) - cont.: ‘[…] I felt that I had to avenge his [her father’s] death, in a sense, myself, that my father was my Republican, in a sense. My father had been born in 1919, when the State was founded. And so, because his whole life - and my mother’s whole life, and the whole generation’s life - his whole life, had been sacrificed to the partition of the country, you know, they had paid a huge price for what I had. I had my education, and I had some sense of history, and a lot more. I was being allowed to speak. I was having my books published. As a poet I was being indulged. I was told: “Yes, you are good. You can, you have this fit, and we will pay you, give you a voice.” But I thought: “Yes, I have this voice, but now I have to speak for my father and mother, because they had been silenced, and they had been not educated, and my mother had no life, and my father had no life. They had no freedom, and they had no vote, and they had no stature.”’ Of the Belfast Agreement: ‘Everything changed then because “the Troubles” were stopping. Before that, if you used [39] the word “Irish” in your poem, it was always stopped, it was very dangerous. It was not allowed. But now, they are encouraging its use more and more, for whatever purposes, for their own purposes. I think really it is in order to maintain their power, they would allow people to be more Irish.’ […&c.] (Ibid., pp.39-40.)

María Jesús Lorenzo Modia, (interview, in The European English Messenger, Autumn 2004, 2004): remarks about her mother (‘I see her as an island that has been separate, made of two people or whatever […] in a sense she is the result of the politics’ and relatedly about language (‘the way that the language was killed through the fighting […] The fact that [..] I cannot talk to my mother, is also a symbol of this language gap.’); expresses anger at the death of Thomas Russell (‘he could have let us sort things out. He would have led us’) and at the Troubles (‘the result of these earlier mishandlings’) and the Famine (‘I think that’s my main anger’); speaks of segregation and discrimination; remarks that poets in the South ‘have had to […] liberate themselves from Catholicism. While to me Catholicism is not like that at all, more like an English Catholicism, it’s a bit like Anglicanism, you know, it’s not a repressive thing to me, but it’s more a liberating thing to me because for us the Church was only sanctuary.’ Speaks of the name of streets in N. Ireland (‘with those royal names’) and the name of Belfast (béal ferstun): ‘nobody explained this to me […] And so you’re living in this world where you don’t have any connection with the names’; calls the Latin liturgy of the Church ‘a way out of this British, royal British choking that I felt’; speaks of the Church for Northern Catholics: ‘There was an emotional sucker there. I felt suckered [for succoured?] by the Church […] I felt very mothered, mothered […] It was always for a reason that it was a place of refuge.’ [End.]

Languageless: ‘I feel languageless, I feel my soul tongue-tied, but many of the other Irish poets do also, the male ones, if you read what they say about Irish and their disassociation from it. You feel odd writing or speaking a language which you know was imposed historically recently. […] I use English awkwardly, as if I have no right to, it doesn’t correspond to tribal or racial memories. I think when I write poetry I solve the problem, I develop a specialised language of my own, fairly private, which is not English, less than, more than English which subverts, deconstructs, kills it, makes it the dreamlanguage I have lost. At least, this is the motivation.’ (Letter of 8 Feb. 1989, in Stacia L. Bensyl, ‘“To Pupulate New Ground”: Fertility Imagery in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian’ [UCD Diss. 1989, p.139]; cited by Shane Murphy, ‘“You Took Away My Biography”: The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian’, in Irish University Review, 28, 1, Spring/Summer 1998, p.110-32, p.120.)

[ top ]

Sleeping with Monsters: ‘I was brought up in Belfast. I wouldn’t have been a poet, I don’t think, if I had lived anywhere else.’ Further, ‘You can’t write without suffering, if it’s not your personal suffering then the suffering of your people, or the suffering of your nation.’ (Interview, in Gillian Somerville-Arjat & Rebecca E. Wilson, eds., Sleeping with Monsters: Conversations with Scottish and Irish Women Poets, Dublin: Wolfhound Press 1990, p.2; quoted in Jennifer Hardy, UG Essay, UUC 2003.)

Being less: ‘I know being a woman for a long time was being less, being excluded, being somehow cheap, being inferior, being sub. I associated being a woman with being a Catholic and being Irish with being from the North, and all of these things being not what you wanted to be. If you were a woman, it would have been better to be a man; if you were Catholic it would have been a lot easier to be Protestant; if you were from the North, it was much easier to be from the South; if you were Irish it was much easier to be English. So it was like everything that I was was wrong; everything that I was was hard, difficult and a punishment.’ (Danielle Sered, interview, Emory Univ., Atlanta, GA, USA; April 1998 [www.edmory.edu]; quoted in Jennifer Hardy, UG Essay, UUC 2003.)

Feminism?: ‘You know, if you’re too demanding for your freedom then you are going to destroy your home. I’m for feminism as long as it doesn’t destroy in woman what is the most precious to her, which is her ability to relate and soften and make a loving environment for others as well as herself […] Sometimes there is something in feminism that demands you to be almost masculine and that’s what frightens me a bit about it, or to sort of repudiate reproduction […] I find feminism attractive in theory but in practice I think it ends up influenced by lesbians and very lonely and embittered and stressed and full of hatred.’ (Interview with Susan Shaw Sailer, in Michigan Quarterly Review, 1993, 111-23; quoted in Jennifer Hardy, UG Essay, UUC 2003.)

[ top ]

References
Blake Morrison & Andrew Motion, eds., The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1982), contains ‘Slips’, ‘The Hollywood Bed’, ‘The Gardener’, ‘The Flitting’, ‘The Weaver-Girl’, ‘Next Day Hill’ (pp.196-99; note that McGuckian is the last poet in the collection.)

Susan Sellers, ed., Delighting the Heart: A Notebook by Women Writers (London: The Women’s Press 1989), contains five essays by McGuckian.

Frank Ormsby, ed., Poets of Northern Ireland (Belfast; Blackstaff 1990), lists McGuckian, ed., The Big Striped Golfing Umbrella: An Anthology of Children’s Poetry from Northern Ireland (Arts Council of Northern Ireland 1985).

[ top ]

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 3, selects from The Flower Master, ‘Slips’, ‘The Flitting’; from Venus and the Rain, ‘The Villain, ‘Painter and Poet’, ‘Catching Geese’ [1410-1411; BIOG, 1435.

Patrick Crotty, ed., Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 1995), selects “The Seed-picture” [330]; “The Flower Master” [332]; “The Sitting” [332]; “Marconi’s Cottage” [333]; from “Porcelain Bells”, 3: “Speaking into the Candles” [334].

Catalogues
Books in Print (1994), Portrait of Joanna (Belfast: Ulsterman Publ. 1980); Single Ladies: Sixteen Poems (Devon: Interim Press 1980), 23pp. [0 904675 17 3]; The Flower Master (London: OUP 1982) [0 19 211 949 4; 0 85235 124 1], and Do. [rev. edn.] (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press 1993), 58pp. [1 85235 125 X]; Venus and the Rain (London: OUP 1984), 55pp. [0 19 211962 1], and Do. [rev. edn.] Venus and the Rain [rev. ed.] (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press 1994), 55pp. [1 85235 144 6]; On Ballycastle Beach (London: OUP 1988) [0 19 282106 7]; Two Women, Two Shores, with Nuala Archer [New Poets Series Vol. 16] (Baltimore: Chestnut Hills 1989) [0 932616 19 4]; Marconi’s Cottage (Dublin: Gallery Press 1991), 110pp. [1 85235 082 2], and Do. [rep. edn.] (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1992) [1 85235 081 4; 1 8522 197 7]; Captain Lavender (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press 1994), 83pp. [1 85235 142 X].

Hibernia Books (Catalogue 1996) lists K. Smith, interviews with McGuckian and Bernard MacLaverty and lect. on Beckett, Gown Literary Supplement (1986) [QUB student journal].

[ top ]

Notes
National Poetry Competition (UK 1979) was won by Medbh McGuckian with “The Flitting”, for which she entered using a masculine name in the belief that women writers were not acknowledged as real poets.

Eavan Boland “Special Issue”, Irish University Review (Spring/Summer 1993), contains contrib. by Mebdh McGuckian regretting not having heard Eavan Boland’s voice ‘when it happened’ [q.p.].

Hostile voices: See comments on the ‘forged McGuckian’, in Patrick Ramsay’s belligerent review of Patrick Crotty, Contemporary Irish Poetry (1995), in Fortnight Review, Jan. 1995, p.33.

Guglielmo Marconi: Broadcast winner of the 1898 Kingstown Regatta to land from his yacht; relics of his experiments kept in Maynooth’s former Museum of Ecclesiology, centred on Rev. Prof. Nicholas Callan, 1799-1864; b. Dromiskin, Co. Louth; ed. Rome; followed Alessandro Volto’s experiments with interest; established a laboratory in Maynooth on his return in 1826; designed “Maynooth battery”; made world’s largest battery by linking 577 cells, powering a magnet that could lift two tons; entry in 8th edn. of Encyc. Brit.; invented the induction coil (transformer), producing estimated 600,000 volts; killed turkeys in demonstrations; website at http://www.may.ie/museum.

Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian is an innovative contribution to the scholarship on Belfast poet, Medbh McGuckian. This book considers the entire oeuvre of this globally respected Irish woman writer, a member of the contemporary avant-garde with now fifteen (U.S. published) volumes and numerous individual publications. The author positions McGuckian’s oeuvre as political and historical poetry and offers a provocative new assessment of its crafted silences. This work argues that it is the muted character of McGuckian’s poems—a consequence of a defamiliarized language, the overwhelming sway of the image, and a profusion of intertextual quoting - that constitutes their agency and force. The silences are read as a response to the precarious positionality of poet and speaker at the site of “disaster” and the limits of articulacy. In line with Rukeyser’s notion of the life of poetry, the life of McGuckian’s silences is located, Fadem argues, in the poems ‘production, as revealed self-reflexively’, and in their prolonged consumption. This oeuvre operates as a formidable counter-discourse by converting poetry's reception into a much protracted task that redistributes the temporal economy of poem and reader and disrupts the given structures of time, place, and the order of things. (Google Books Notice [et al.].)

[ top ]