Medbh McGuckian is an extraordinarily talented poet whose work is amongst the most original and experimental in the English language today. She remains the one woman poet from Northern Ireland whose name is regularly included alongside an otherwise exclusively male group of Northern poets, and her work has been internationally–known for some considerable time. But common criticisms of McGuckian’s poetry range from the suggestion that she has remained an apolitical poet who has refused to engage with the sectarian politics around her, to one who is overly-fixated on the inner, private life of woman as mother and artist. Above all else, however, McGuckian is known as an ‘obscure and esoteric writer’ (p. 4) who produces inaccessible and difficult poetry. This was the view of Patrick Williams in his 1989 review of her collection On Ballycastle Beach: ‘if lines are so arbitrary that they mean more or less anything, then necessarily they mean more or less nothing’ (p. 177). It is with this aspect of the poet’s work that the essays in this collection are most concerned. Explicitly named as a key function of the collection is the desire to provide ‘interpretative pathways into McGuckian’s work, to account for its hypnotic beauty and to provide theoretical models, which help explain its supposed “obscurity”’ (p. 18). This is the first book of essays solely dedicated to McGuckian’s work. It consists of eleven essays, which cover a very broad range of topics and theoretical perspectives: Michaela Schrage-Früh undertakes an examination of self and place in McGuckian’s early poetry, in terms of national and political consciousness, and with a particular focus on ‘The Rising Out’, read in relation to Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’, to argue that it is an inherently political poem, but one that rejects the conventional equation between the female body and national territory. Catriona Clutterbuck draws on psychoanalytic theory (principally that of Julia Kristeva) to demonstrate the poetics of subjectivity in the early poetry while Helen Blakeman also draws on Kristevan theory to undertake a comparative reading of McGuckian with the Symbolist texts of Mallarmé in order to show that the oeuvre of each poet demonstrates the instrumentation of what, in reference to Lacanian theory, can be termed ‘polysemantic play’. Elin Holmsten examines samples of McGuckian’s poetry through the lens of post-structuralist and French feminist perspectives on language to show the ways in which the poet attempts to revitalize language through a departure from restrictive modes of writing. Scott Brewster then uses a Levinasian theoretical model to examine both the house and hospitality in McGuckian’s ‘house poems’, concluding that they offer a ‘fable of interlocution, where we overhear our own strangeness and yet remain capable of hearing, and responding to, other others’ (p. 115). Using McGuckian’s Had I a Thousand Lives (2003), Conor Carville investigates the rationale behind McGuckian’s act of naming as a practice of remembrance, suggesting ultimately that this single collection allows us as readers to, at once, participate in the painstaking process of remembrance, particularly that associated with Irish nationalism, and to acknowledge the difficulties of such a commemorative enterprise. Editors Shane Alcobia-Murphy and Richard Kirkland look at memory and atrocity in McGuckian’s poetry and the politics of minority discourse, respectively. Borbála Faragó investigates the different guises of the muse in McGuckian’s poetry, whether men, women, angels or readers, and concludes that their presence constitutes a manifestation of both a pre-Platonic and a post- Romantic figure. Leontia Flynn’s chapter engages with specifically identified muses, namely the authors that the poet borrows from when constructing her poetry. The anthology also includes a lengthy interview with McGuckian by the editors, Alcobia-Murphy and Kirkland, which provides excellent insights into McGuckian the person, the woman and the poet. Especially interesting in the interview is McGuckian’s honest discussion of her working methods and pattern of ‘borrowing’ from other sources, which, in her opinion, represents a ‘way of asserting [her] rights; it’s a way of getting back [her] freedom in the language’ (p. 199). Equally valuable is Clair Wills’ Afterword, which addresses the often critical misunderstanding of McGuckian’s intense concern with carving out a place for herself in a poetic tradition, which Wills suggests was achieved by ‘studied’ moves, rather than any straightforward assault on authority (p. 210). Wills suggests that although the anthology and McGuckian herself acknowledge the different phases of the poetry—the ‘virginal’, the moralizing, the death sequence, the political and the period of serenity, ‘suspicious of the peace process’ (p. 210)— it is also important to recognize the common concerns that bind these phases into a whole. I do have to question whether the stated aim of the essays as being to ‘rescue McGuckian from obscurity (in all senses)’ (p. 4) has been achieved or, in fact, could ever be achieved. This is a seriously scholarly piece of work, engaged with a very scholarly poet and, as a result, the theoretical perspectives deployed could work to complicate the poetry even more for some readers. Fans of McGuckian and of literary theory will truly appreciate it. I doubt that anyone who is not already a fan will be won over by this selection. By and large, however, this is a very welcome addition to the fields of Irish/Northern Irish poetry, Irish women’s poetry, McGuckian studies and Irish studies.