‘Turning One Sort of Poetry into Another’: Medbh McGuckian’s Captain Lavender and the Surface Reader

Abstract

This essay assesses the cultural importance of Medbh McGuckian’s fifth collection of poems, Captain Lavender from 1994, and argues that it is a pivotal collection in McGuckian’s overall achievement marked by a decisive shift in her themes and technique. The essay places the work in the context of the cultural politics of Northern Ireland at the time, focuses closely on the varied contemporary critical response her work received, and explores the degree to which (what has been termed) the ‘surface reading’ model of literary analysis enables some of McGuckian’s poetic preoccupations to be viewed in sharper focus. As a result the essay argues that ultimately the significance of the collection lies not in its turn to an idea of ‘the political’ as an overt subject for poetry (as has been previously argued), but the manner in which this shift enabled a deeper apprehension of the dialectic of self and other and the creative ways in which this could be visualised.
 
 Keywords: Medbh McGuckian, Captain Lavender, surface reading, symptomatic reading, Northern Irish poetry, Northern Irish cultural politics