The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian: The Interior of Words

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The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian: The Interior of Words

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Authors: Shane Alcobia-Murphy and Richard Kirkland
Affiliation: University of Aberdeen and King's College London
Publication Year: Hardback 2010
Pages: 272
Size: 234x156mm

ISBN: 9781859184653

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This is the first collection of essays solely dedicated to the achievement of this remarkable Irish poet. The book contains eleven essays by internationally known scholars, a new interview with McGuckian herself, and a detailed bibliography. McGuckian's critical reputation has grown dramatically over the last decade and she is now a poet with an international reputation. This collection provides a timely and engaging appraisal of her work.

Author of twelve collections of poetry, Medbh McGuckian is one of Northern Ireland's foremost poets. Her poetry now appears as standard reading on courses on Irish literature and culture both in Europe and in the US. Alongside this, her work is also often featured in composition and poetics courses. As this suggests, her work is not confined to the Irish Studies constituency. Because one of the major themes of her work is female consciousness and creativity she is also frequently studied on women's studies programmes and courses on feminism. As the first book to concentrate solely on McGuckian's achievement, this collection will become the standard work for anyone interested in her work.

Shane Alcobia-Murphy: Introduction
Michaela Schrage-Fruh: Speaking as the North: Self and Place in the Early Poetry of Medbh McGuckian
Catriona Clutterbuck: A Gibbous Voice: The Poetics of Subjectivity in the Early Poetry of Medbh McGuckian
Helen Blakeman: 'Poetry Must Almost Dismantle the Letters' : McGuckian, Mallarmé and Polysemantic Play
Elin Holmsten: Signs of Encounters in Medbh McGuckian's Poetry
Scott Brewster: The Space that Cleaves: The House and Hospitality in Medbh McGuckian's Work
Conor Carville: Warding Off an Epitaph: Had I a Thousand Lives
Shane Alcobia-Murphy: 'That Now Historical Ground' : Memory and Atrocity in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian
Richard Kirkland: Medbh McGuckian and the Politics of Minority Discourse
Borbola Farrago: 'They Come Into It' : The Muses of Medbh McGuckian
Leontia Flynn: Re-assembling the Atom: Reading Medbh McGuckian's Intertextual Materials
Shane Alcobia-Murphy and Richard Kirkland: Interview with Medbh McGuckian
Clair Wills: Coda

Dr Shane Alcobia-Murphy, Department of English, University of Aberdeen, is the author of Sympathetic Ink: Intertextual Relations in Northern Irish Poetry (2006). Professor Richard Kirkland, Department of English, King's College London, is the author of Cathal O'Byrne and the Northern Revival in Ireland, 1890-1950 (2006).

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Medbh McGuckian is an extraordinarily talented poe	January 10, 2011
Reviewer: Rebecca Pelan Australian Journal of Irish Studies from Republic of Ireland

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 Fr h 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 Mallarm 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. Borb la Farag 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.

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