“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 bluemay, black rape / For the pupils, millet / For the vicious beige circlesunderneath. / the single pearl barley / That sleeps around her dullness/ Till it catches light, makes women / Feel their age, and sign forliberation.’ (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.)

[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 candle 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): ‘[What] I find most valuable and authentic 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 [Marina] Tsvetaeva, whom we both sort of discovered as a kind of ... prerunner, yes, who has the same dynamism and the same feeling of being at one with the world.’ (pp.598-99.)

Further: ‘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.)

‘[A]t 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.)

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]; quoted 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.)