The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian: The Interior of Words

Afterword

Afterword CLAIR WILLS 208 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 The Flower Master, which had been published in 1982, but which I had missed. Then in 1988 came On Ballycastle Beach. By that time it was clear that here was a poet with an unmistakable voice, intellectually challenging and richly sensuous at the same time, a poet who sounded like nobody else.The terms used to describe her work tended towards the sensual. She was ‘beguiling’, ‘bewitching’, and sometimes ‘frustrating’. Later the word was ‘gorgeous’. With the benefit of hindsight these early volumes seem almost dazzling in their clarity. This is especially true of The Flower Master, even in the Oxford Poets rather than the revised Gallery Press version.This has partly to do with the formal, syntactical structure of these early works. Many of the poems are built around a loose question and answer format. In ‘Lychees’, for example, past and present versions of relationships set one another in balance. Then there’s that direct and confiding voice. Even where the metaphors stretch at the seams, there’s a conversational tone to the Flower Master poems, and a relatively stable central figure who leads us through the narratives of suppressed desire, sexuality, fertility and growth. The clarity also derives from the underlying lucidity of the pool of metaphors from which she drew in her early work – the precision of the images relating to areas of personal and intimate experience: clothing, interiors , gardens, seeds. We were good, as readers, at noticing the ramifying meanings of images of growth and fertility, of ownership, and of the relationship to the past, and to a defining tradition.We noted the power of the grandmother’s history as a containing narrative in ‘The Seed Picture’, for example, or the story of moving in and taking one’s place which is tracked Afterword 209 through many of the poems and which is both familial and ‘national’ at the same time. We were perhaps less good at understanding McGuckian’s intense concern with her place in a poetic tradition, which was not only national and gendered, but international.Yes, we saw the allusions to women poets and artists – Dickinson, Plath, Beatrix Potter. (Later Tsvetaeva, Kahlo, Modersohn -Becker and many others.) But the very tough intellectual stand she was taking on the relationship between art and sexuality sometimes did get lost in vague commentaries on writing the body, and particularly writing parturition. It is perhaps easier to see through the lens of her more recent concerns with female folk remedies, and the relationship between image and writing in the private space of the home, just how radical McGuckian’s vision was. For all the references to grandmothers in The Flower Master, the last thing McGuckian offers us is a celebration of woman’s tradition. Plath is as much raided as revered. Just like those women pushed aside in ‘The Soil Map’ – she drinks to them as she takes their place. As Richard Kirkland notes in his essay here, McGuckian’s unfolding drama of unconscious desire, containment and control was compressed into the very early poem ‘Smoke’, which stands as the opening lyric in the revised version of The Flower Master and Other Poems.The idea that containment is beyond the poet (‘I am unable even /To contain myself’) is of course belied by the structure of the lyric, with its emphasis on control through halfrhyme and line-break. A better term for control might be deliberation, or indeed, to use a metaphor from Robert Frost which haunts much of McGuckian’s work as it does those of several of her Northern Irish contemporaries , design. For all McGuckian’s statements about vatic inspiration (discussed here by Leontia Flynn) it is the deliberateness with which she creates ambiguity and even opacity which is most striking, using stretched and unhooked metaphors, yes, but also more traditional poetic techniques such as the pun, the line-break, enjambment, and grammatical and syntactical shifts. Think of those endlessly migrating pronouns. It is deliberation and control, as much as co-dependence (of the mother and child, or woman and lover) which lie...