Medbh McGuckian
Life
1950- [née Maeve Teresa Philomena McCaughan];
b. 12 Aug. in Belfast, of nationalist parents, her mother a former
telephonist; ed. Holy Family Primary School, Newlington and Dominican
Convent, Fortwilliam Park; Queens University, Belfast, B.A.
1972, and M.A. thesis on Gothic Influence on Nineteenth Century
Anglo-Irish Fiction, dealing with the Banims, Marim. John
McGuckian, a school-teacher, 1977, with whom 3 sons and a daughter; a
Edgeworth and William Carleton, 1974; first publ. poem, Marriage,
appeared in Honest Ulsterman (June 1975); teacher at Dominican
Convent and St. Patricks, Knock, East Belfast; |
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wrote The Flitting,
a poem submitted pseudonymously under a male name, winning the National
Poetry Competition, 1979; Eric Gregory Award, 1980; The Flower
Master (1982), won her the Rooney Prize and Alice Hunt Bartlett
Award; ed. The Big Striped Golfing Umbrella, an anthology
of childrens poetry from Northern Ireland for the Arts Council
(1985); first female writer in residence, QUB, 1985-88; much influenced
by reading Mandalstam and Rilke; lit. ed., Fortnight, 1989-93[?];
McGuckian was the only girllected for inclusion in Paul Muldoonsaber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry of 1986 |
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appt. visiting professor at Berkeley, 1991;
Marconis Cottage (1991) short-listed for Irish Times/Aer
Lingus Award; suffered the death of her father, 1992; gave Creative
Writing classes to republican and loyalist prisoners, 1992-94; issued
Captain Lavender (1995), with epigraph from Picasso [I
have not painted the war but I have no doubt that the war is in
these paintings I have done]; asst. ed. on Womens addendum
to The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing; Flower Master
(rev. edn. 1994), with alterations in order of poems and revisions
of certain lines; writer in residence, University of Ulster (Coleraine),
1995- ; |
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her Selected Poems, ed. Dillon Johnston
& Peter Fallon (1997), became a Poetry Book Society recommendation;
Shelmalier (1998), based on events of the 1798 Rebellion;
an article of 1998 by Shane Murphy revealed extensive borrowings
- whether plagiarism or intertextuality according to critical taste
(Irish University Review, Spring/Summer 1998); winner of
Forward Poetry Award, 2002; moves between Belfast and Ballycastle;
visited the Emmet family of Newtownmountkennedy, Co. Wicklow, and
issued Had I a Thousand Lives (2003), on centenary of Emmet
and Thomas Russell; |
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issued new collection, The Currach Requires
No Harbours (2006); McGuckian was the focus of events at the
Ulster Poetry Symposium, 29th-30th Jan. 2007; issued My Love
has Fared Inland (2008), a new collection; her papers are held
at Emory University (Atlanta); issued The High Caul Cap (2012);
issued Blaris Moore (Sept. 2015), a collection centred on
four executed men of 1797; issued The Unfixed Horizon: New Selected Poems (2015), drawing on 14 collections to 2013; Marine Cloud Brightening (2019) includes elegies to Irish poets and to her younger brother; teaches at Heaney Centre of QUB. FDA
HAM ORM OCIL ATT DIL |
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Works
Poetry |
- Portrait of Joanna (Belfast: Ulsterman 1980);
- Single Ladies (Budleigh Salterton: Interim 1980), [pamphlet];
- The Flower Master (Oxford/NY: OUP 1982), 51pp., rep.
as The Flower Master and Other Poems (Oldcastle: Gallery
1993, [rev. edn.] 1994), 58pp.
- Venus and the Rain (Oxford: OUP 1984), and Do.
[rev. edn.] (Oldcastle: Gallery 1995), 53pp.;
- On Ballycastle Beach (Oxford: OUP; Winston-Salem: Wake
UP 1988);
- Two Women, Two Shores, Poems by Medbh McGuckian and
Nuala Archer (Galway: Salmon; Baltimore, Md.: New Poets Series
1989);
- Marconis Cottage (Oldcastle: Gallery 1991); Do. (Oldcastle: Gallery 1991; Bloodaxe
1992), 110pp. [
- Captain Lavender (Oldcastle: Gallery Books 1995), rep.
as The Flower Master and Other Poems (Oldcastle: Gallery
1993[var. 94]), 58pp.;
- Shelmalier (Oldcastle: Gallery 1998), 118pp.;
- The Face of the Earth (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2002),
82pp.;
- Had I a Thousand Lives (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2003),
88pp.;
- The Book of the Angel (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2004),
88pp.;
- The Currach Requires No Harbours (Oldcastle: Gallery
Press 2006), 80pp.
- My Love has Fared Inland (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2008),
88pp.
- The High Caul Cap (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2012), 79pp.
- Blaris Moore (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2015), 88pp.
- Love, the Magician (Arlen House 2018),
- Marine Cloud Brightening (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2019),
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Selected Editions |
- Selected Poems, selected by Dillon Johnston and Peter
Fallon (Oldcastle: Gallery 1997) [Poetry Book Soc. recommendation];
- The Unfixed Horizon: New Selected Poems (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2015), 339pp.
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Contributions |
- Marriage, [poem], Honest Ulsterman,
48-49 (June 1975), [q.p.];
- The Love Game, Gateposts
[poems], Threshold, [guest] ed. John Hewitt, 31 (Autumn-Winter
1980), p.9;
- Black Virgin, Dividing [sic]
the Political Temperature, and White Windsor
Soap, in Epoch, 44, 3 (1995), pp.264-68;
- The Silhouette of a Camel, [poem for
Bill Clinton], in Fortnight Review (Dec. 1995), p.24;
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Criticism & articles (sel.) |
- [with Hugh Haughton,] An Eye on the Everyday, review
of Faber Poetry Introduction 5, in Times Literary Supplement
(13 Aug. 1982), pp.876;
- Medhb McGuckian - Telling Men about the Feminine Experience,
Queens Letter, 2, 6 (QUB 1986), p.3;
- The Timely Clapper, contrib. short piece in The
State of Poetry [special issue], Gerald Dawe and Jonathan
Williams, eds., Krino (Winter 1993), pp.45-46;
- Death Withstood, review of Seamus Heaney, The
Redress of Poetry, in Fortnight Review, 344 (1995),
p.36;
- review of Homan Potterton, Irish Arts Review, in Fortnight,
339 (May 1995), p.34 [focuses on three Irish women artists];
- poem [ded. Seamus Heaney], in Irish Times (7 Nov. 1995)
[the morning following the announcement of the Nobel Award to
Heaney];
- Belfast Quarters, on some distinctive city neighbourhoods,
see Whose City?, supplement with Fortnight,
381 (March 1996), [q.p.];
- Drawing Ballerinas: How Being Irish has Influenced Me
as a Writer, in Lizz Murphy, ed., We Girls: Women Writing
from an Irish Perspective (Australia: Spinifex 1996), pp.185-203;
- The Poetry Quartets, 4 (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe
1999) [double cassette of Durcan, Kennelly, Longley, McGuckian
talking about their poetry];
- Horsepower Pass By!: A Study of the Car in the Poetry of
Seamus Heaney (Coleraine: Cranagh 1999), 38pp.;
- Mitsuko Ohno, ‘Hokusai, Basho, Zen and More: Japanese Influences
on Irish Poets’, in Journal of Irish Studies (IASIL-Japan),
XVII (2002), pp.15-31 [questionaire-response].
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Miscellaneous |
- ed., The Big Striped Golfing Umbrella: An Anthology of Childrens
Poetry from Northern Ireland (Arts Council of Northern Ireland
1985);
- trans., with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, The Water Horse, by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (2002);
- Poems, in Last Before America
- Irish and American Writing: Essays in Honour of Michael Allen,
ed. Fran Brearton & Eamonn Hughes ( Belfast : Blackstaff Press
2001), p.203.
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Discography |
- with Paul Durcan, Brendan Kennelly & Michael Longley [Poetry
Quartets, 4] (London: British Council / Bloodaxe Books 1999),
2 audio cass. [113 mins. - talking about their poetry].
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Note: A poetry collection entitled
The McGildowney Marine Band [Lapwing Poetry Pamphlet,
No. 10] (Belfast Lapwing 1992, 32pp.) is listed in COPAC as the work of John McGuckian
but cf. prev. reference to MacIldowney
Marine Band [?1977] by Mebdh McGuckian. Also by John
McGuckian: Star and Sparrow Rest (Kilcar, Co. Donegal: Summer
Palace Press 2008), 64pp. and Talking With My Brother
(Kilcar, Co. Donegal: Summer Palace Press, 2002), 64pp. |
[See COPAC/Library Discover Hub - online;
accessed 03.03.2020.] |
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[ top ]
Criticism
Full-length studies |
- Shane Alcobia-Murphy & Richard Kirkland, eds., The Poetry
of Medbh McGuckian: The Interior of Words (Cork UP 2010),
x, 272pp. [see contents].
- Michaela Schrage-Früh, Emerging Identities: Myth, Nation
and Gender in the Poetry of Eavan Boland, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill
and Medbh McGuckian [Mainz University Studies in English,
Bd. 7 MUSE] (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität) (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher
Verlag Trier 2004), 228pp.
- Maureen Ruprecht Fadem, Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry
of Medbh McGuckian (NY: Rowan & Littlefield 2019), 310pp.
[see contents].
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Articles & chapters, &c. |
- Michael Allen, Barbaric Yawp, Gibbous Voice [review],
Venus and the Rain, in Honest Ulsterman, 77 (1984),
pp.56-64.
- James Simmons, review of Venus and the Rain, in Belfast
Review, 8 (Autumn 1984), p.7 .
- Tim Dooley, Soft Cushionings, review of Medhh McGuckian,
The Flower Master, in Times Literary Supplement
(29 Oct. 1982), p.1200.
- Alan Jenkins, Hearts in the Right Place [review],
On Ballycastle Beach, in Observer (10 July 1988),
p.33.
- Clair Wills, The Perfect Mother: Authority in the Poetry
of Medbh McGuckian, in Text and Context, 3 (Autumn
1988), pp.91-111 [see extract].
- Blake Morrison, Tropical Storms [review], Venus
and the Rain, in London Review of Books (6-19 Sept. 1984),
pp.22-23.
- Clair Wills, Voices from the Nursery: Medbh McGuckians
Plantation, in Michael Kenneally, ed., Poetry in Contempory
Irish Literature Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1995) [ cp.375;
see extract].
- Michael ONeill, Bidding for Power [review],
Venus and the Rain, in Times Literary Supplement
(30 Nov. 1984), p.1393.
- Patrick Ramsey, Quality and Quantity [review],
in The Irish Review, 5 (Autumn 1988), pp.122-26.
- Anne Stevenson, With Eyes Open and Closed [review],
in Portrait of Joanna, in Times Literary Supplement
(21 Aug. 1981), p.952.
- Williams, Patrick, Spare That Tree! [review], On
Ballycastle Beach, in Honest Ulsterman, 86 (1989),
pp.49-52.
- Clair Wills, Country Feelings [review], On Ballycastle
Beach, in Times Literary Supplement (19-25 Aug. 1988),
p.915.
- Martin Mooney, Body Logic, Some Notes on the Poetry of
Medbh McGuckian, Gown Literary Supplement (1988),
pp.16-18.
- Kathleen McCracken An Attitude of Compassion, [interview],
Irish Literary Supplement, 9 (Fall 1990), pp.20-21.
- Medbh McGuckian [interview], in Gillian Somerville-Arjat
and Rebecca E. Wilson, eds., Sleeping with Monsters: Conversations
with Scottish and Irish Women Poets (Dublin: Wolfhound Press
1990), pp.1-7 [extract].
- 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 [see extract].
- Patrick Crotty, review of Marconis Cottage, in
Irish Times, 7 March 1992 [cited in Mary OConnor
The Thieves of Language?, in Krino, Spring
1994, pp.30-42.
- 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
and Studies 1994), pp.1-19 [see extract].
- Kimberly S. Bohman, Surfacing: An Interview with Medbh
McGuckian, in The Irish Review, 16 (Autumn/Winter
1994), pp.95-108.
- Clair Wills, Medbh McGuckian, in Improprieties:
Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (OUP 1993)
[incls. Medbh McGuckian: Personal Interviews with Clair
Wills, 10 Jan. 1986, 20 Nov. 1986 & 19 June 1988].
- Susan Shaw Sailer, interview, in Michigan Quarterly Review
[q. iss.] (1993) 111-23 [see extract].
- Thomas MacCarthy, reviewing the rev. edn. of The Flower Master
(Gallery 1993), in Poetry Ireland, 41 [Sexuality
Special Issue] (Spring 1994), pp.69ff..
- Eileen Cahill, ,Because I Never Garden: Medbh McGuckians
Solitary Way,, in Irish University Review,
24, 2 (1994), pp.264-271.
- Allison Rolls, review of Marconis Cottage, in
Krino (Spring 1994) [q.pp.].
- Niall McGrath, The McGuckian Enigma, Interview with Medbh
McGuckian, in Causeway (Summer 1994), pp.67-70.
- Laura OConnor [Foreword & Afterword], Comhrá:
Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, in
The Southern Review: Special Issue on Irish Poetry, V,
31, 3 (1995), pp.581-614 [see extract].
- Clair Wills, Voices from the Nursery: Medbh McGuckians
Plantation, in Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature,
ed. Michael Kenneally [Studies in Contemporary Irish Literature,
2; Irish Literary Studies, 43] (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1995),
pp.373-99.
- Michael Allen, The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian, in
Elmer Andrews, ed., Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection
of Critical Essays (London: Macmillan 1996), pp.286-309.
- Mary OConnor, Medbh McGuckians Destabilising Poetic,
in Éire-Ireland, XXX, 4 (Winter 1996), pp.154-72.
- Rand Brandes, A Dialogue with Medbh McGuckian in Winter
1996-1997, in Studies in the Literary Imagination,
30, 2 (Fall 1997), pp.37-62.
- Shane Murphy, You Took Away My Biography:
The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian, in Irish University Review,
28, 1 (Spring/Summer 1998), pp.110-50 [revealing extent of intertextual
debts].
- Michael Laskey & Carol Rumens, The Birthday of Monday
[poem]: Two Readings of the Poem, in Éigse Eire/Poetry
Ireland Review, 62 (Autumn 1999), pp.12-26 [Laskey, Its
Name has Not Explained, pp.19-22; Rumens, Words Unsoftened,
pp.23-26].
- Jolanta Burgoyne-Johnson, Bleeding the Boundaries: The Poetry
of Medbh McGuckian (Coleraine: Cranagh Press 1999), 41pp.
- Alexander G. Gonzalez, ed., Contemporary Irish Women Poets:
Some Male Perspectives (Westport/London: Greenwood 1999) [contains
Gonzalez, Celebrating the Richness of Medbh McGuckians
Poetry: Close Analysis of Six Poems from The Flower Master,
and Charles L. ONeill, Mebdh McGuckians Poetry:
Inhabiting the Image, pp.65-78].
- Danielle Sered, The Destination of a Rhyme: Elusiveness
and Theft in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian [Working papers
in Irish studies] (Ft. Lauderdale: Nova Southeastern University
2001), 13pp. [i.e., allusions];
- Mitsuko Ohno, Hokusai, Basho, Zen and More: Japanese
Influences on Irish Poets, in Journal of Irish Studies
(IASIL-Japan), XVII (2002), pp.15-31.
- Naoko Toraiwa, Translation as an Exit: Medbh McGuckians
On Ballycastle Beach, in Journal of Irish Studies
[IASIL-Japan], XVII (2002), pp.34-47 [see extract].
- John Brown, In the Chair: Interview with Poets from the North
of Ireland (Galway: Salmon Press 2002) [q.pp.].
- Helen Blakeman, Metaphor and Metonymy in Medbh McGuckians
Poetry., in Critical Survey, 14.2 (2002), pp.61-74.
- Guinn Batten, Boland, McGuckian, Ní Chuilleanáin
and the Body of the Nation, in The Cambridge Companion
to Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. Matthew Campbell (Cambridge
UP 2003), pp.169-88 [incls. Shane Murphy, Sonnets, Centos
and Long Lines: Muldoon, Paulin, McGuckian and Carson, pp.189-208].
- Leontia Flynn, The Life of the Author: Medbh McGuckian
and Her Critics, in New Voices in Irish Criticism,
4, ed. Fionnula Dillane & Ronan Kelly (Dublin: Four Courts
2003), pp.159-66.
- Shane Murphy, Sonnets, Centos, and Long Lines: Muldoon,
Paulin, McGuckian and Carson, in The Cambridge Companion
to Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. Matthew Campbell (Cambridge
UP 2003), pp.189-208.
- María Jesús Lorenzo Modia, An Interview
with McGuckian, in The European English Messenger,
13, 2 (Autumn 2004), pp.35-43 [with bibl., and cover port.; see
extract].
- J. Edward Mallot, Medbh McGuckians Poetic Tectonics,
in Eire-Ireland, 40, 3&4 (2005), pp.240-55.
- Michaela Shrage-Früh, An Interview with Medbh McGuckian,
in Contemporary Literature, 46, 1 (2005), pp.1-17.
- Lorenzo Modia, Maria Jesús. ‘“Because God
is Forbidden to Perform Miracles in this Place”: Medbh McGuckians
Sense of History, in Thistles: A Homage to Brian Hughes
- Essays in Memoriam [Homenaje a Brian Hughes: Ensayos in Memoriam]
, Vol. 2, ed. Francisco Yus (Universidad de Alicante 2005),
pp.175-85.
- Fred Johnston, review of The Book of the Angel, in omnibus
review [McGuckian, Wyley, Cronin], Books Ireland (March
2005), p.51 [see extract]
- Shane Alcobia-Murphy, Sympathetic Ink: Intertextual Relations
in Northern Irish Poetry (Liverpool UP 2006), 284pp. [on Heaney,
Muldoon & McGuckian].
- Nessa OMahony, From colour-coded messages to skilful
portraits, review of Medbh McGuckian, The Currach Requires
No Harbours [et al.], in The Irish Times (14 April
2007), Weekend Review, p.12 [see extract].
- Niamh Hehir, I am unable even / To contain myself:
The Maternal Threshold of Subjectivity in Medbh McGuckians
The Flower and Other Poems, in Essays In Irish
Literary Criticism: Themes of Gender, Sexuality, and Corporeality,
ed. Deirdre Quinn & Sharon Tighe-Mooney (Lampeter: Mellen
Press 2008), q.pp.
- Shane-Alcobia-Murphy, Strange Little Girls?: Medbh McGuckians
Poetics of Exemplarity, in The Irish Review, Nos.
40-41, ed. Aaron Kelly [Cork UP] (Dec. 2009), pp. 74-90.
- Leontia Flynn, On the Sofa: Parody & McGuckian,
in Irish Poetry After Feminism, ed. Justin Quinn [Princess
Grace Irish Lectures, 10] (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 2008)
[q.pp.];
- Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Medbh McGuckian: The Lyric of Gendered
Space, in Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern
Ireland, 1968-2008 (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer 2008), pp.225-48.
- 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 [see full text in Ricorso Library Journals
> Critical > IUR - see extract.]
- Hugh McFadden, review of The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian, in Books
Ireland (Sept. 2010), pp.175-76.
- Lucy Collins, Joyful Mysteries: Language and Spirituality
in Medbh McGuckians Recent Poetry, in Irish Women
Writers: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Elke dHoker,
et al. ([Intern.] Peter Lang 2011), q.pp.;
- Niamh Hehir, I have grown inside words/Into a state
of unbornness: Evocations of a Pre-linguistic Space of Meaning
in Medbh McGuckians Poetry, in Irish Women Writers:
New Critical Perspectives, ed. Elke dHoker, et al. ([Intern.]
Peter Lang 2011), q.pp.
- Eric Falci, McGuckians histories, Continuity
and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966-2010 (Cambridge UP 2012)
[Chap. 3].
- Leontia Flynn, Domestic Violences: Medbh Mcguckian and Irish Womens Writing in the 1980s, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Fran Brearton& Alan Gillis (Oxford: OUP 2012), pp.417-[35].
- Stephanie Schwerter, Northern Irish Poetry and the Russian
Turn: Intertextuality in the Work of Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin
and Medbh McGuckian (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2013),
x, 251pp.
- Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem, Outlining Silence in the Poetry
of Medbh McGuckian, in The Literature of Northern Ireland:
Spectral Borderlands (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2015), pp.99-135
[see extract].
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See also Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality
in Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: OUP 1993), 272pp. [readings
of Tom Paulin, Medbh McGuckian, and Paul Muldoon].
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Dissertations |
- Clair Wills, Language, History and Sex in the poetry of
Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian [D.Phil diss.] (Oxford
1989), 296pp.
- Deryn Elizabeth Rees-Jones, Body in Mind: Meanings and
Metaphors of Female Anatomy and the Quest for Creative Identity
in Women's Poetry, with Special Attention to the Work of Medbh
McGuckian [M.A. Diss.] (Wales: Bangor University 1992),
q.pp.
- Catriona Clutterbuck, "Self-representation and the politics
of authority in contemporary Irish poetry: Eavan Boland and Medbh
McGuckian" [D.Phil diss.] (Oxford University 1996), v, 277pp.
- L[eontia] M. Flynn, Reading Medbh McGuckian [PhD
Diss.] (Belfast: QUB 2004) - another copy at British Library;
also available on World Wide Web.
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[ top ]
Bibliographical details
Shane
Alcobia-Murphy & Richard Kirkland, eds., The Poetry
of Medbh McGuckian: The Interior of Words (Cork UP 2010), 272pp.
CONTENTS: Alcobia-Murphy, Introduction; Michaela Schrage-Früh,
Speaking as the North: Self and Place in the Early Poetry of Medbh
McGuckian; Catriona Clutterbuck, A Gibbous Voice: The Poetics of
Subjectivity in the Early Poetry of Medbh McGuckian; Helen Blakeman,
Poetry Must Almost Dismantle the Letters: McGuckian,
Mallarmé and Polysemantic Play; Elin Holmsten, Signs of Encounters
in Medbh McGuckians Poetry; Scott Brewster, The Space that
Cleaves: The House and Hospitality in Medbh McGuckians Work;
Conor Carville, Warding Off an Epitaph: Had I a Thousand Lives;
Alcobia-Murphy: That Now Historical Ground: Memory and
Atrocity in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian [prev. in IUR,
Summer 1998]; Kirkland, Medbh McGuckian and the Politics of Minority
Discourse; Borbola Farrago, They Come Into It: The Muses
of Medbh McGuckian; Leontia Flynn, Re-assembling the Atom: Reading
Medbh McGuckians Intertextual Materials; Alcobia-Murphy &
Kirkland, Interview with Medbh McGuckian; Clair Wills, Coda. |
Maureen Ruprecht Fadem,
Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian (NY:
Rowan & Littlefield 2019), 310pp. CONTENTS. Foreword: Reckoning
With (Womens) 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 McGuckians 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 McGuckians
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 Writers 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 writers 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 McGuckians 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 Tsvetaevas
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: McGuckians 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 McGuckians strengths.
(Books Ireland, Oct. 1995, p.250.)
Kathy Cremin [Centre for Womens 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: McGuckians 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 McGuckians 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 OReilly,
reviewing Shelmalier (1999) in The Irish Times [Jan. 30th
1999], writes: McGuckians 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 Im 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 dont 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 doesnt immediately
comprehend it. [Compares McGuckians 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.] / mcGuckians
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
doesnt 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 OMahony,
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
McGuckians 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 OBrien has called
McGuckians 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 Catherines 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
McGuckians 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 poetrys magic,
but not its meaning. The poet-critic, Justin Quinn, who has himself advanced
convincing arguments about the relevance of McGuckians 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 McGuckians
poetry is the critic, Guinn Batten, who remains one of her most incisive
commentators. Writing about McGuckians, 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 Battens
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 Kristevas 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 mothers 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 mothers / speakers
relationship with her daughter during pregnancy (as one-yet-two),
their physical separation at the daughters 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 readers 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 mothers
own dreams and is the mist through which the mothers desire
can be reached rather than seen for herself. The enunciatory line,
In the beginning I was no more echoes the opening of St
Johns 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 childs death to aquatic life,
the mothers 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 OReilly, 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. McGuckians 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 OReilly, 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. / Prufrocks 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 Yesterdays Child1> by May Spaulding and Penny Welch; and Will Pritchards Outward Appearances, both studies of the early science of paediatrics). /The ultimate point though is that McGuckians 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.)
[ top ]
Quotations
The Flitting: You
wouldnt believe what this house has cost me - / In body language
terms, it has turned me upside down. / Ive 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 womans 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 Nualas [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 dont love the language
enough […] Because its an imposed language, you see, and
although its my mother tongue and my own way of communicating,
Im 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 Ive
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
thats 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 were
going in to bomb Iraq because Saddam is the villain, these men taught
me to say: Whos 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 hadnt. And I was writing poems about other things. I was
writing poems about … I dont 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, its almost
the reverse. So, thats 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 fathers] 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 mothers whole life, and the whole generations
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 thats 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, its
a bit like Anglicanism, you know, its not a repressive thing to
me, but its 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 youre
living in this world where you dont 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 doesnt 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 wouldnt have been a poet, I
dont think, if I had lived anywhere else. Further, You
cant write without suffering, if its 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 youre too demanding for your freedom then you are going to destroy
your home. Im for feminism as long as it doesnt 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 thats 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.)
Gallery Books - notice on Blaris Moore (Sept. 2015) |
Medbh McGuckian extended the range of Irish poetry. Her gloriously
mysterious work calls to mind the rhapsodic utterances of Emily
Dickinson and (though with more sensuality) an older contemporary,
John Ashbery.
Her new collection, Blaris Moor, takes as its title
and starting point a traditional popular ballad that commemorates
the trial, conviction and execution of four militiamen in 1797.
Larger conflicts shadow these poems, including World Wars I
and II. Meditations on the Flight of the Earls in the
early 1600s move to thoughts of the Somme and Flanders.
Drawing on diverse, arcane sources, Medbh McGuckian constructs
poems that have their own cohesiveness. Frequently her patterns
of thought and syntax resist meaning. Hers is an art to be apprehended
more than comprehended.
But there are poems here that feature the courtroom drama
of direct political address and, most satisfyingly and surprisingly,
a number of shorter pieces, evocative in their concentration
of Medbh McGuckians earlier work and of the poems which
secured her reputation.
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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 Womens 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 Childrens Poetry from Northern Ireland
(Arts Council of Northern Ireland 1985).
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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]; “Marconis
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]; Marconis 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].
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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 Bolands voice when
it happened [q.p.].
Hostile voices: See comments on the forged
McGuckian, in Patrick Ramsays 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 Maynooths former Museum of Ecclesiology, centred on Rev. Prof.
Nicholas Callan, 1799-1864; b. Dromiskin, Co. Louth; ed. Rome; followed
Alessandro Voltos experiments with interest; established a laboratory
in Maynooth on his return in 1826; designed Maynooth battery;
made worlds 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 McGuckians
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 McGuckians 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 Rukeysers notion of the life of poetry, the life
of McGuckians 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.].)
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