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11 Interview with Medbh McGuckian (Athol Hotel, Aberdeen, 6 May 2007) SHANE ALCOBIA-MURPHY AND RICHARD KIRKLAND 194 Q. You’ve published six collections of poetry in the last six years,almost doubling your number of publications.Why has that period been so productive for you? A. 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 before that I was travelling and always looking for a writer’s-in-residence job and feeling insecure about money. Now I’m actually paid to write. Also, the RAE [Research Assessment Exercise] provides a certain amount of pressure:the more books you bring out the better. Q. It is unusual for a publisher to agree to bring out a collection every year by a single author. How has that agreement come about? A. My relationship with Peter [Fallon; editor of Gallery Press] is very good. We came to this crisis when he was doing a book every four years or so, and in the meantime I had stockpiled work – a nuclear armament that I thought was going to explode!When he’d say,‘Maybe we should do a new book?’ I would have two hundred poems and we’d have to consider how we’d bring them out. Meanwhile, Michael Schmidt from Carcanet Press tried to seduce me away from Gallery by saying,‘We have John Ashberry and the reason we have him is that we do a book for him every year.’And he was soft-soaping me by saying,‘You’re just as good as JohnAshberry and we’ll do you a book every year if you leave Peter and come to us.’ I liked Michael Schmidt,but I just wasn’t sure.I suppose I might have got on better having a British publisher but Peter has always been good for me and Interview with Medbh McGuckian 195 I just didn’t want to leave him.So I went back to Peter and told him about the agreement with Michael. I said, ‘Look, you bring out a book every four years, and Michael can do the other three years – he can soak up the inferior poems and I’ll give you my best poems.’ He was aghast and mortally offended.He agreed to do a book whenever necessary.He’s been very good and would do one every year if I insisted. I don’t think he makes much money on the books or that he sells many of them.He probably only does a small run of about five hundred. He probably only gets rid of a couple of hundred of them. But it’s nice for me. Q. You were first published by Oxford University Press.What were the circumstances of your move from them? A. The first three books were with Oxford and they were reasonably successful . I was still considered as a British poet – I had won the Cheltenham award. I was not emphasising my Irishness too much because I didn’t really think of myself that way. But I wasn’t an English goody-two-shoes! Anyway,the controversy arose when I was getting my poems ready for the Marconi’s Cottage collection and I was becoming something else.I felt I had changed. I had been to America and had a difficult time there, and the Marconi poems were a coming home. I had decided I wouldn’t emigrate – I wouldn’t do what Paul Muldoon or Seamus Heaney had done. I would stick to my guns,as it were,and not leave.So what happened was,I was getting together these poems which were so different – I felt the Marconi poems were more complicated and I was beginning to get more political. So I think the voices were twofold.The Oxford people didn’t like the new style.They couldn’t understand some of the poems – they were set in other voices, particularly the one about Gwen John [‘Road 32, Roof 13-23, Grass 23’] – and they weren’t sure whether it was poetry or just madness. And so that was a difficult time. I didn’t realise this...

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