Abstract
Although the sights and scenes produced are often ones of radical, dazzling estrangement, Medbh McGuckian’s poetry is primarily an art of the eye. The acts of looking and relooking, visualising and envisioning, motivate a great many of McGuckian’s expansive body of poems. By no means the exclusive sensory catalyst for her imagination, sight is nonetheless the central one. The pace of her poems is determined more by their arrangement of images and figures than they are by matters of sound, narrative, rhetoric, or rhythm. The intensely metamorphic quality of those images means that while a reader can rarely settle into a coherent lyric scene or argument, she can often get some purchase on McGuckian’s hermetic texts by tracking a poem’s morphing course of images. The Face of the Earth allows us to see McGuckian’s visual poetics with great clarity.
 
 Keywords: McGuckian, Medbh; The Face of the Earth; lyric poetry; visuality; imagery
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