There is a rhythm to McGuckian's work that carries the reader through her words and her ideas and almost mystifies her, seduces her. The rhythm creates a flow through the poem, as well as making the reader pause at these beautiful phrases and repeat them for pure joy of the sound. The reader experiences this constant do and un-do, this stop and go, and in this way McGuckian encloses the reader within the music of the poem. She gets past the language and calls attention to "voice," for voice "has its rhythms" (Wing, ix).

Voice, like the deepest levels of the imagination, is "undefinable but much talked about" (Wing, ix). Voice has a power, perhaps because the "rhythms of voice are connected to a body" (ix), especially the mother's body. Cixous says that the "privileging of voice" is connected with the mother at the deepest level.

The child who has not yet learned she is not coextensive with the mother's body, as she first loses the coherence of enveloping liquid and sound, must experience her earliest sense of otherness by losing the sounds of her mother's body, and hearing the familiar timbre

of her mother's voice come from another place. This is an intrinsic part of our coming into separate being. . .Voice comes from a moment beyond the alienation of culture, it is heard before there is an "I" to listen to it. (ix)

Thus the rhythm of McGuckian's poetry may be one characteristic that makes her work specifically female. For voice, much more than words, is untranslatable and cannot be forced to express itself under the contraints of a gendered tool. McGuckian must be aware of the connections between rhythm and the body, "specifically with the body of the mother" (x), since her work is full of room/womb imagery that relates to the "secret place" of the unconscious. Voice is also one tool that McGuckian uses to access the unconscious, or the "intimate meaning of things," as Cixous would call it.

Wing says that Cixous "tries to write 'with her eyes closed'" (viii). She continues: One of the means she uses to subvert everyday, useful language is to play with its surface music, in a Joycean confusion of phonic elements, calling our attention to what is encoded there and how we use it--which also at times implicates the visual with the phonic. (ix) Again, the rhythms of voice help the reader to access the deepest levels of the imagination.

The connection between a mother's body and the rhythms of voice draw us in "like music, lulling us, sucking us into a sense of existing in a moment of space and time in which we seem connected to another meaningfully and without mediation" (x). Also, voice "offers us something very specific, an odd cross between the deepest illusion and the deepest promise" (x). The voice of McGuckain entraps the reader within the music of the poem, and she seems to exist for a moment in the "secret place"--the space of the deepest illusions and deepest promises that belong to McGuckian. By holding us within her rhythms the poet hopes to offer us access to our own "truth rooms."