The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian

Cover

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Title Page, Copyright Page

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Contents

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pp. v-vi

Acknowledgements

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pp. vii-

We would also like to express our heart-felt gratitude to Medbh McGuckian for permission to quote from her work and for granting us an interview – such good-natured co-operation is rare, and her contribution to this volume is inestimable. We would also like to formally acknowledge the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at Aberdeen for providing a...

List of Contributors

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pp. ix-x

Introduction

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pp. 1-21

Author of twelve collections of poetry, Medbh McGuckian is one of Northern Ireland’s foremost poets; however, she has not won the critical acclaim accorded to her peers. While there are monographs and collections of essays devoted to the work of Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley, McGuckian’s oeuvre tends to be overlooked. The reason...

1. Speaking as the North: Self and place in the early poetry of Medbh McGuckian

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pp. 22-40

Medbh McGuckian ranks among the most prolific and original contemporary poets in English. She is, moreover, the only female poet to have gained international renown alongside an almost exclusively male generation of Northern Irish poets. Surprisingly, however, despite her Northern Irish background, the majority of critics have tended to label McGuckian’s poetry...

2. A Gibbous Voice: The poetics of subjectivity in the early poetry of Medbh McGuckian

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pp. 41-67

During the period in which Medbh McGuckian was establishing her authority as artist – from the early 1980s up to her fourth volume, Marconi’s Cottage (1991) – that authority was configured through a process of confirmatory self-displacement: resistance to expansionist ego as the means of delivering the subject. There is a paradox in claiming such a procedure for a...

3. ‘Poetry must almost Dismantle the Letters’: McGuckian, Mallarmé and polysemantic play

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pp. 68-83

It may initially seem incongruous to make a connection between Medbh McGuckian and Stéphane Mallarmé and yet, despite differences of time and place, the oeuvre of each poet demonstrates the instrumentation of what, in reference to Lacanian theory, can be termed ‘polysemantic play’. This is not to say that what motivates each poet to utilise such polysemantic play is identical...

4. Signs of encounters in Medbh McGuckian’s Poetry

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pp. 84-104

The complex issues of the nature of signs, speaking or representation generally, as commented on by Heidegger and Levinas above, have been extensively debated in contemporary philosophical discourse and aesthetic practices. In this respect, Medbh McGuckian’s poetry is no exception, since many of her poems deal with representational acts such as writing and...

5. The Space that Cleaves: The house and hospitality in Medbh McGuckian’s work

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pp. 105-116

The house in Northern Ireland has at times offered only partial sanctuary from turbulence ‘outside’: it is a physical and affective interior, a space of retreat and secrecy, yet it remains far from invulnerable to the history it must endure. The phrase ‘safe house’ paradoxically suggests both shelter and security, and also the harbouring of a threat within. The unheimlich house has...

6. ‘Warding off an Epitaph’: Had I a thousand lives

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pp. 117-129

Questions of names and naming loom large in Medbh McGuckian’s collection Had I a Thousand Lives (2003): the act of naming as a mode of control, as a means of change and renewal, and as a token of possession.¹ Most of all, however, naming appears in these poems as a practice of remembrance. In this sense one could argue that behind McGuckian’s collection there remains...

7. ‘That Now Historical Ground’: Memory and atrocity in the poetry of Medbh McGuckian

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pp. 130-146

When searching for ways to impose a meaningful order upon reality, we rely on memory for ‘the provision of symbolic representations and frames which can influence and organize both our actions and our conceptions of ourselves’.² However, in the aftermath of the Belfast Agreement and the creation of the Northern Ireland Assembly narratives produced by the media and...

8. Medbh McGuckian and the politics of minority discourse

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pp. 147-161

The creation of human subjectivity is a necessarily endless process. Described by Gilles Deleuze as a ‘becoming’, it is a condition that constantly looks towards a final goal, a homecoming, but that destination is always deferred, always held out of reach. To understand and live within this is a difficult art, one that requires a particular sensuousness and a sensitive...

9. ‘They Come into It’: The muses of Medbh McGuckian

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pp. 162-176

The most enigmatic participant in the performance of inspiration is the imaginary subject who, in one way or another, exerts authorial influence on the completion of the work. Whether imagined or real, this person, the muse, functions as the created projection of the work’s singularity. In simpler terms, he or she becomes an essential participant in the performance of inspiration...

10. Re-assembling the Atom: Reading Medbh McGuckian’s intertextual materials

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pp. 177-193

The title poem of On Ballycastle Beach speaks of ‘read[ing] these words to you [. . .] meaningless and full of meaning’,¹ and may be taken as a description of the aesthetic which first brought Medbh McGuckian’s work to critical attention. By the time of the publication of her third collection, however, the poet’s meaningful meaninglessness, or meaningless meaningfulness...

11. Interview with Medbh McGuckian (Athol Hotel, Aberdeen, 6 May 2007)

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pp. 194-206

My husband isn’t working, so he’s taking on all of the household responsibilities, the cooking and the shopping. Also, the children have grown up – the youngest [her daughter, Emer] is eighteen – so that gives me a bit more leeway. Although I now have my mother to look after instead of them, I do feel I have more time for writing. I also have a regular job, with a regular income, whereas...

Afterword

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pp. 208-213

I first encountered Medbh McGuckian’s work soon after the publication of Venus and the Rain, in 1984. There was a stand devoted to the Oxford Poets series in the middle of the ground floor of Blackwells in Oxford, where I was then living, and, amongst Penelope Shuttle and Peter Porter and D.J. Enright, I found Medbh’s work. Venus and the Rain led me back to...

Notes and references

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pp. 215-245

Bibliography

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pp. 247-252

Index

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pp. 253-262