Beer connects McGuckian's poetry to some of the work of Heléne Cixous. Beer quotes Cixous concerning the essential act of writing:

To admit that writing is precisely working (in) the in-between, inspecting the process of the same and of the other without which nothing can live, undoing the work of death. . .

(Taken from Cixous's "The Laugh of the Medusa").

McGuckian remains fixed in this in-between realm--in between the conscious and the unconscious, or in between the physical body and the psyche. She exists in a place of "interconnected consciousness which maternal thinking allows her to inhabit" (Beer, 202).