"My Cleverly Dead and Vertical Audience": Medbh McGuckian's "Difficult" Poetry

Abstract

The looking-glass of Medbh McGuckian’s mind reflects, but transmutes to its own purposes, all that it receives. McGuckian, the author of twelve collections of poetry, has the rare ability to transform dreary, time-rubbed words into phrases that enliven the spirit with the first-timeness of poetic thinking. However, when reading her work, reviewers are often made to feel like puppies barking at the Sphinx. For instance, puzzled by the apparent gnomic tendencies of her first collection, The Flower Master (1982), Robin Lane Fox stated that it was “exotic in its imagery and impenetrable in its reference.” Kevin T. McEneaney concurred, observing that the poetry’s “obscure logic” created “unnecessary confusions.” Reviewers of subsequent collections have often had the same reaction: Aidan Matthews lamented that her poems had a propensity to “escape the reader.” Nick Rowe complained that the collection was characterized by the “dark speak of riddle.” James Simmons (like McGuckian, a poet from the North) went so far as to say of one collection that it was “a salutary joke by one who hates the excesses of reviewers or literary critics or bad poetry and knows she can elicit rave reviews by writing an alluring book of nonsense.” While one cannot deny that McGuckian’s poetry is often difficult to understand, critics have of late developed different strategies to enable a reader’s appreciation of the thematic and stylistic richness of her verse. For example, critics have usefully read her work within a Kristevan theoretical framework, empha-