The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian: The Interior of Words

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

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 as apolitical, not at all rooted in her native soil, thereby routinely excluding her from discourses of Northern Irish identity. At the same time, her supposed avoidance of political, public and national issues has often been deemed evasive, if not escapist, in a Catholic poet who was born and has spent all her life in Belfast, thus having experienced her share of the Northern Irish Troubles. Partly due to McGuckian’s idiosyncratic use of domestic and nature imagery, critics have been disposed to categorise her early work as domestic and private, concerned exclusively with ‘women’s issues’ such as pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, while her notoriously dense, oblique and complex style has encouraged feminist readings in terms of écriture féminine.The following representative statements by McGuckian critics may serve to sketch the extent to which McGuckian’s work, especially her early poetry written throughout the 1980s, has been relegated to the realm of the private.Thus, in a review from 1985, Christopher Benfey claims that McGuckian hasn’t followed Seamus Heaney in searching for ways to be true to one’s own private experience while registering the public strains of the North [. . .] To scan her poems for allusions to sectarian violence would be as fruitless and naive as to sift Emily Dickinson’s poems for references to the Civil War.1 According to Michael Allen, in an article from 1992, there are ‘[t]wo related issues [that] confront the reader of Medbh McGuckian’s poetry.The first is her obscurity, the second her female identity. It is only in passing from one to 22 1 Speaking as the North: Self and place in the early poetry of Medbh McGuckian MICHAELA SCHRAGE-FRÜH Self and place in the early poetry of Medbh McGuckian 23 the other that one needs to mention her Irishness.’2 Finally, as late as 1999, Jonathan Hufstader maintains that McGuckian’s first four collections of poetry are, in core,‘nonpolitical (in any sense of the word)’ as well as ‘[e]rotic, domestic, sensitive to detail, and private’. And he concludes: ‘To be born a poet in Ulster, as Heaney long ago pointed out, does not require that one have a microphone at one’s lips.When McGuckian talks about responsibility, she means motherhood.’3 In this chapter I will argue that a concern with Irish identity is at the heart of McGuckian’s early poetry.This concern, however, is complicated and at times obscured by the conflation of woman and land/nation in Irish cultural and literary discourse.Thus, in the Irish cultural imagination, both the Irish land and nation have been traditionally envisaged as female, with Erin as a young maiden in distress, about to be ravished by imperial male England; as a harlot, about to collaborate with the coloniser; or as a mother bemoaning the suffering of her children. In Irish literature, the trope of Ireland as a woman appears in various guises, as Dark Rosaleen, Erin, Hibernia, the Shan Van Vocht or Mother Ireland,and,most famously,asYeats’s Cathleen Ní Houlihan, the old hag who turns into ‘a young girl [. . .] with the walk of a queen’4 when young men sacrifice their lives for her.5 That these gendered representations are by no means limited to nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century colonial discourse is confirmed, for instance, by Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Act of Union’, published in his 1975 collection North. Here, the poet depicts Ireland as a woman raped by ‘imperially / Male’ England, presenting Northern Ireland as the ‘bastard child’ originating from an enforced ‘act of union’.6 Similarly,his bog-poems continue the conflation of woman and land in his invocation of pagan fertility rites.As ClairWills aptly puts it,‘the representation of the Irish land as a woman stolen, raped, possessed by the alien invader is not merely one mythic narrative among many, but, in a literary context, it is the myth, its permutations so various and ubiquitous it can be hard to recognize them for what they are’.7 Thus, the Northern Irish female poet’s sense of self is inevitably shaped not only by her immediate socio-political...