Medbh McGuckian is the most controversial female poet in Ireland at the moment, and has been so since her first publication. The immediate assumption then is that her poems must be intensely political and gendered. Her experiments with imagery and narrative order are paralleled only by female poets in the United States, where poetry in general is much more probabtive and adventurous. This comparison instantly marks her as an opinionated, brash, and possibily lesbian poet, especially to a mind schooled only in American contemporary poetry.
Most people only read one or two poems by a poet, such as those introduced in The New Yorker or the Irish Literary Supplement. The majority of people only see the most controversial poems, or the poems marked by critics as illustratory of the author's unique style, etc. Thus the general public does not gain any understanding of a poet's work as a whole, which is especially important when trying to understand McGuckian.
With all these assumptions in mind, I entangled myself within McGuckian's poems and was surprised to discover a woman of such humility, a mothering nature, decidely unpolitical on certain issues, and exceedingly down-to-earth--more so than any other poet I have read. There is no question about the energy and passion that drive her poems, but the woman behind the words is more "traditional" than one might imagine. She is not the firey, wire-haired, chain-smoking, bangled image of Jorie Graham, but rather a woman of the country with a plaid flannel shirt and a weathered appearance.
Similar to Jorie Graham, McGuckian seeks to uncover "truth", or the unconscious, or whatever one may call it, as well as bring voice to the stories of women. Her poems concern this process of uncovering, while each poem is a process in-and-of itself. Her words and thoughts continually fold in one one another, and the final stanza might return you to the original sentence. According to this form the poem/process in never complete and the reader will remain in a state of uncovering truth and/or tapping into her unconscious.
This non-linear style is informed by her gender, whether consciously or sub-consciously, and indicates a female approach towards self-discovery. For McGuckian, self-discovery produces understanding that can be applied to humanity on a grander scale. With McGuckian this self-discovery is personal and some critics have claimed that her work is "self-fixated" (Flannery, 20). Denis Flannery, who reviewed her book, Marconi's Cottage, claims that McGuckian's work "cheerfully and explicitly ignores the risk of choking on its own exclusivity" (21).
In my opinion, her exclusivity makes her poems powerful; McGuckian draws on her own experiences and emotions when she sits down to write. She uses moments from her life with her children, her husband, her community, and even from her solitary time to empower her words and images. Poems based on generalities and assumptions are made weaker by their lack of personal thought and emotion. A poet cannot pretend to know the experiences and sentiments of most women, but she can present her own intricacies in such a way as to access the hearts of a greater audience.
Flannery also criticized McGuckian's relationship to language. He writes, "First, both the language and the self are omnivorous in their relation to the world around them. Everything gets subsumed into these concerns" (21). I have argued against his attack upon her relation to the (her) self and I must also disagree with his attack upon her relationship to language. Language is central to McGuckian's greater goal--unveiling the unconscious which is the imaginative power. Language, which informs our thoughts, cannot be separated from this process of unveiling the unconscious. McGuckian attempts to de-layer her conscious every time she sit down to write, and when questioning her every thought and feeling she must use language, even if only to question our reliance on language or the limits of language. Besides, she struggles to de-gender language as many female contemporary poets do.
Through her questioning and de-layering of both herself and her language. McGuckain seems to capture the rhythms of life. This is what I like most about her work. There is a metric beauty that accompanies her exquisite images and phrases, and a music/motion that folds us into her poems deeper and deeper with each reading. She encloses us within her words, or perhaps her poems absorb us like "blue" absorbs many characters in her poems.