Belfast-born Medbh McGuckian’s work is fluid, shifting, musical, and when read in this new selected poems it becomes easier to evoke an atmosphere, or tone, than to boil her down to any cold facts.
One begins to understand a McGuckian poem will usually creep up on you, in ornate fabrics, suggestive of gardens and early mornings; it will proceed by gesture, hint, or implication: “tricks you might guess from this unfastened button,/a pen mislaid, a word misread,/my hair coming down in the middle of a conversation”.
There is a pointed gorgeousness to the language, a slightly baroque yet scrupulous unfurling.
We’re almost in Elizabeth Bowen territory at times, with the sound turned up. McGuckian is dead-set on life as lived, “not the menacings of love” but something engendered by them.
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She cuts her words to fit, or suit, “sunsetty”, “Irished”, “churchish”, and builds rooms, even cities, out of a method of devoted analogy-making, in imagery that carries off the difficult trick of a descriptive synaesthesia: “The wedding-boots of the wind/blow footsteps behind me”; “a forest is a highly-perfumed dungeon”.
It feels apt at least to nod towards the ghost of Wallace Stevens; there is surely fellow-feeling here for his rococo vocabulary, maximalist Francophilia and elusive, loaded symbol-making: “a musk-duck swayed over/the off-horse Fleur-de-Lis/and stars”; “the sort of music/written by the horse himself”.
The poems can also settle into the straightforwardness of a realist play – bringing a new angle on all this daily communion, the rituals of love or of adult womanhood:
rare as a box of flowers arriving
with all their heads cut off – he appears to be
drying dead champagne from a teacup, speaking
that voice you can say anything in
from garden to half-moon garden
McGuckian’s is, too, a “voice you can say anything in” and that extends to the political realm on a number of occasions, taking a step back to survey the difficult, fractured whole: “One had one’s back to the peace monument./The bomb is probably lodged in there/where it will be safe from bombs”. “I speak the language, I know how to be a woman here” she writes, and “Just let me moisten your dreamwork”.
One walks around in these poems, is played by them, in an aura of sunsetty pleasure.
