Captain Lavender

by medbh-mcguckian

In this volume, Medbh McGuckian unfolds a beautiful array of themes—art, religion, landscape, nation, home—that will be as seductive to initiates as they are glowingly familiar to lovers of her work. We start with sensual understanding (“the form of feeling”), move among the various arenas of experience (sexuality, work, marriage), women’s sensations in particular, and even more specifically the religious passions of women, and consider their lives on islands both symbolic and real, islands with which McGuckian has often signaled the existence of the individual, as well as Ireland’s place in the larger world. The poems cast an hypnotic spell that grows until, in the deep acknowledgement of human suffering, the reader becomes a “picturesque believer” in “saints that have the gift of dreaming right” (“Galilee Porch”). The source of such visionary belief is in perception itself. Like the currach of its title, her style moves fleetly across its contents, requiring no particular harbors because all harbors, and subjects, are its own.

Genres: Poetry, Irish Literature

Paperback

First published November 1, 1994

Reviews

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been slowly making my way through McGuckian’s selected, The Unfixed Horizon: New Selected Poems. Which gave me a preview of this book. And in my notes there, I’d seen the poems selected from this book mainly in a political light. But the politics of these poems is complicated by the Irish landscape, the patriarchal culture of Ireland, and the poet’s intimate draw towards men or a single man in her life. It reads, for me, like an embodied patriotism whose position on the patriarchy is influenced by this man she admires but doesn’t always agree with. Though I’m not entirely sure whether I should be reading the poems in a romantic light, or a purely political one. As the book comes to a close, the poems tend toward a more explicit politics, and the consideration of political order feels more tied to the men around the poet, but most of the book juxtaposes both romantic tenderness and political tension against the order apparent in nature—or the tone when you feel the natural order.

McGuckian’s poetry has always occupied this kind of complexity for me. It’s a slower language. Especially in its sentences. Or I find I read her poems slower, keenly prepared for the agile, grammatical shift that will inevitably appear. Where a poem that had originally been looking at the ocean might suddenly be a poem that is extensively particularizing the textures and upholstery patterns of the poet’s living room, so that the domestic is, in fact, as expansive as the the ocean. It can sometimes be in the context of this domestic life that the semi-romantic, semi-paternalistic presence appears. And so when McGuckian suddenly directs the poem to landscape, so suddenly, in fact, that it sometimes feels like grammar conflates object and object. McGuckian’s poems propose a consistently complicated rhythm. Encouraging me to read the long-term relationships to other people in a political light, but my reading is more a might-be reading, something tentative. Because it also might be the poet’s mortal presence amid the land she is from. And maybe that’s political, too.

Reading this book, then, in the context of 2020s America, where poems often use concussive lyric moves or sharp rhetorical outrage to address the hostile injustice that has long been part of the American experience, McGuckian’s poems propose a poetics of alertness to the political textures of her country. Meaning the poems are inescapably political. But being political in Ireland must be a very different kind of political. Which might be an obvious statement. But I make it in an attempt to account for the surprise that is implicit to these poems. Not only are the poems a slower language. But the mind set I can feel reading them positions me in the very specific patient and cognizant life of this woman living in that country. Her poems adjust my vision.

[Jenna · Rating 2 out of 5]

On a sonic level, these poems are prosodically beautiful, caressing your ears like the sound of rustling leaves or flowing water. The line breaks are authoritatively placed in a way that respects the taut-muscled autonomy of each individual line, and the sentences are syntactically complex in a way that does not starve or insult the reader's intelligence. These are poems that really *sound* like poetry.

Through Google, I learned that the first half of the book concerns the death of the poet's father, while the second half revolves around the poet's experiences teaching political prisoners. Maybe I'm just stupid, but I don't think I would ever have been able to figure this out from the poems themselves; these poems are, by and large, opaque in a way that can be quite frustrating. It's almost as though they were written in a code that was only intended to be fully understood by the poet herself and a select group of her intimates. Frankly, I'm not sure this is a good thing.

Furthermore, McGuckian has an Ashberian tendency to seem to get carried away by the complexity of her own metaphors, as in the following example: "I feel warmth coming from you/as clouds working up the sky/seen through warm clouds/that are cold at the base." A metaphor like that seems overly convoluted to me, without much payoff in the way of increased comprehension. This may just be a matter of personal preference, but I crave more epiphanies, more rapturous thunderclaps of insight that speak lucidly to my intellect as well as to my ear. I want to read poems that will make wiser, that will teach me general truths about love or death or humanity, and it can be difficult to extract such general truths from poems as stubbornly cryptic and psychologically idiosyncratic as these.

But I like the rare moments in which McGuckian's poems get self-referential, fragmentedly elucidating the nature of her own personal aesthetic: beautifully, she speaks of longing for a book that "makes a plaster cast of the moon," a book that "rubs out of the frail moon a strong one." Coyly, she asserts that what "a poetess" does is "speak...with [her audience's] consciousness/and not with words." And, indeed, for better or worse, a re-interpretation of the relationship between words and meaning seems to be at the heart of McGuckian's poetry.

[Cynthia Arrieu-King · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is wonderful and full of prosody, painterly images, a solid sensical line. It's not necessarily my thing, but she does what she's doing incredibly well and with tenderness.