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: Poesis / 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

Cont. (Moynagh Sullivan) ‘[...] “On Her Second Birthday” is a poem about pregnancy and maternity, itself a nexus between body and word, between the illusory, unified speaking subject and the dispersal of intersubjectivity. It layers diachronies of emergence and differencing, interleaving plots of prenatal encounter, peri-natal separation, and linguistic subjectivization. It inscribes the mother’s / speaker’s relationship with her daughter during pregnancy (as one-yet-two), their physical separation at the daughter’s birth, and their psychic separation as the daughter emerges into language around the time of her second birthday. The opening lines of the poem set the scene for the reader’s slippage between the double perspective of child and mother: “In the beginning I was no more / Than a rising and falling mist / You could see though without seeing”. The mother/speaker is the incubating/mediating/poetic frame who represents the world to, and negotiates the world for, the reader/child, and equally, the child/speaker begins life as a projection of the mother’s own dreams and is the mist through which the mother’s desire can be reached rather than seen for herself. The enunciatory line, “In the beginning I was no more’ echoes the opening of St John’s Gospel, ‘in the beginning was the Word [... &c.] ”. Displacing a single point of linguistic incarnation, it establishes several beginnings along the double but different journeys into and away from two-ness and one and another. The words “no more”, act like a hinge describing the child’s death to aquatic life, the mother’s death to her previous self, while the enjambment, “no more / than”, swings the reader onto another psychic plane, representing the state of not being “more/than” one before pregnancy for the mother; and “no more/than” one for the newborn: “Seeking to be born / Carried off half / Of what I was able to say”.’ (See full-text version in RICORSO Library, “Journals > Critical > IUR”, via index, or direct.)

Caitriona O’Reilly, review of Love, the Magician, in The Irish Times (20 Oct. 2018): ‘These are poems that efface their occasions almost entirely, and do so slyly and knowingly. McGuckian’s has always been an elusive, continually self-masking aesthetic, a space where, even when the reader lacks the foggiest idea what the poem is about - a not-infrequent occurrence - the seductions of her technique and the sensuous pleasure of her language are compensation enough. / The strength of McGuckian’s poetry lies in her capacity for phrase-making; her prosody has the ring of complete conviction even when it deals in gorgeous abstractions, her nouns unmoored from their contexts, her grammatical structures unanchored from their referents: “Faithful as rain with its senses open, / its deep, earthy colour puts a well of silky / fins around the house. The lean triangle / of its head is down and governed, while its second / head inside its head (the head in its head) / gets up hungry from the conversation, goes unfed.”

Caitriona O’Reilly, review of Love, the Magician (Irish Times, 20 Oct. 2018) - cont.: There is no doubt a highly coded private meaning here, but such possibilities of denotation come impenetrably cloaked in her familiar vocabulary of flowers, fabrics, jewels, weather effects. With McGuckian one confronts head-on the familiar, tired stereotypes of Irish circumlocution or feminine verbosity: there is the sense that McGuckian has been playing with and subverting such stereotypes throughout her career, that avoiding being pinned down is, for her, an existential necessity. / Prufrock’s exasperated “it is impossible to say just what I mean!” is here raised to the status of a virtue. Then there is the controversial issue of her “borrowings”, the found elements in her work. “We are what we borrow” the narrator of The Marcella Quilt slyly remarks, kitting herself out in second-hand finery. This has developed into something of an industry. Sending scholars scuttling to uncover her source-texts must make for an amusing enough academic game (a few minutes’ desultory Googling will uncover several sources for these poems, among them Nursing Yesterday’s Child by May Spaulding and Penny Welch; and Will Pritchard’s Outward Appearances, both studies of the early science of paediatrics). /The ultimate point though is that McGuckian’s voice is not reducible to this or any other “explanation”; her historical ventriloquism is simply another layer in the multi-layered, self-conscious, and shimmeringly symphonic work of which Love, The Magician represents an intriguing instalment.’ (Reviewed with books by Kate Tempest and John Kelly [of RTÉ]; available online - accessed 11.02.2021.)