Medbh McGuckian's Poetic Tectonics

When you dream wood I dream water.
When you dream boards, or cupboard,
I dream of a lake of rain, a race sprung
From the sea. If you call out "house" to me
And I answer "library," you answer me
By the very terms of your asking,
As a sentence clings tighter
Because it makes no sense.

("The Most Emily of All," McGuckian, Marconi 38)

"I began to write poetry so that nobody would read it. Nobody. Even the ones who read it would not understand it, and certainly no other poet would understand it. Was any of it permanent or literary? It wasn't creative writing at all?"

(McGuckian, "Comhra" 590)

If there exists a method to the madness that Medbh McGuckian's poetry implies, the author certainly would be the last to reveal it. "I just take an assortment of words," she told an interviewer, "though not exactly at random, and I fuse them. It's like embroidery. It's very feminine, I guess" (Wilson 2). Little wonder that, given such an incomprehensible body of work and such a cryptically humble defense, critics such as Patrick Williams find reason to complain:

She does have a voice—boring before you even realise the emptiness of what it is saying. . . . The décor, light and through-the-window world of her sickroom try to enclose and prevent the reader seeing this shell for the diminished place it is. The wonder is that Medbh McGuckian, presumably, thinks such verses amount to worthwhile experience tellingly conveyed.

(qtd. Beer 201)

It does not help that McGuckian appears to occasionally offer self-contradictory answers amongst her interviews, lending support to her self-proffered theory that "no one else" is really meant to read her. More damningly, Shane Murphy has discovered that her poems contain bits and pieces of other literary materials she happens to be reading at the time, offered without acknowledgment and, often, without obvious reason ("Obliquity" 85–86). It may be, then, that a major writer takes an assortment of words, not exactly her own nor at random, and steals them.¹ Still another reviewer theorized that McGuckian's oeuvre consisted of nothing more than a "salutary joke by one who hates the excesses of reviewers or literary critics or bad poetry and knows she can elicit rave reviews by writing an alluring sort of nonsense" (qtd. Broom 133).

General consensus, however, remains of the "rave review" variety, heralding McGuckian as a voice completely new, a master and mystic of metaphor. To read a McGuckian poem is to go on the wild ride of imagery and linguistics she constructs, a dizzying array of substitutions and juxtapositions, affirmations and denials. Peggy O'Brien claims that

[t]o stare too long at a single, still intractable word . . . is to become paralyzed, and whatever accumulated meaning we might have been carrying topples with the jolt of suddenly arrested movement. Motion is critical. . . . Metaphors proliferate with frightening fertility and velocity, like a time-compressed film of a flower blooming. To get caught in one time frame is to miss the climax.

(241)

O'Brien outlines some of the reasons why critics tend to wax breathless in the wake of a poetry that refuses to stand still, a sensibility failing to genuflect to sense. Readers can dream wood or, alternatively, accept water: the poems defy single interpretations, substituting euphony for clarity. If, in all poetry, the sound and the placement of words matter, here they appear to be the only things that count. Readers warm to her, perhaps paradoxically, because they cannot decipher whether her work is so elastic that any fashionable theory seems to "fit" or so rigid that all methods of reading fail. McGuckian has found an adoring audience, amassed competition prizes, and established a unique space within Irish poetry; yet no one, at times not even McGuckian herself, seems to have any idea what it's all about. She claims in "Harem Trousers" that "A poem dreams of being written/Without the pronoun 'I'" (Ballycastle 43), as if the work creates itself. This authorial hesitancy underscores Danielle Sered's...