‘Living So Far from Words’: Intertextuality, Trauma and the Post-Shoah World in Medbh McGuckian’s Blaris Moor

Abstract

Throughout Medbh McGuckian’s latest collection, Blaris Moor, the poet attempts to depict trauma (and its effects) by mimicking the dislocation of the self and the recurrence of the past in the present through quotations, and the sources themselves are about this very process. The collection presents, through its form and content, a profound rejoinder to those who argue that the Holocaust should not (or cannot) be represented in literature.