Outlining Silence in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian

Abstract

One of Ireland’s most celebrated living poets, Medbh McGuckian (1950-) was born in Belfast in 1950. She published her first collection, The Flower Master, in 1982. Since then, she has written ten additional volumes including, most recently, The High Caul Cap (2013).¹ McGuckian was the student of Seamus Heaney at Queens University, Belfast, where she now teaches, and a member of the celebrated Northern Irish poets group.² Her themes center on feminist and gender concerns, the political history of Ireland and the North, and questions of poetry and poesis. McGuckian is viewed as a writer of virtuosic, quite difficult poetry. Most treatments of her work, this one not excepted, address its enigmatic character. As Peter Sirr says, “no contemporary Irish poet is as cautiously celebrated” (462). Critics seem to bestow praise and blame in equal measure, characterizing the poems in ways nearly as baffling as the poet’s own metaphors. In the space of a single review, the work is described as “idiosyncratic” and “original,” “solipsistic,” and “brilliant” (Haberstroh 124). Despite frustrated or even hostile reviews, McGuckian is universally respected. Issues of the underrepresentation of Irish women writers notwithstanding, she is the sole female included in multiple poetry anthologies and first to hold the position of poet-in-residence at Queens University, Belfast (Ibid 123).³ But, while it is true that scholars have begun embracing and theorizing McGuckian’s incomprehensibility,⁴ working “with” it, as it were, still, 11 books and 32 years later, we continue to look for lucidity from her and to bemoan its dearth.