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Selected Poems: 1978-1994
Generous selections from each of Medbh McGuckian's five books serve as an introduction to this gloriously gifted- and pioneering - poet, as a stock-taking moment to reconsider her luxuriant constructions, and as a welcome occasion to learn further how to receive the signals of her opulent imagination.
The sensual, rhapsodic implications of her early work and the engagement of more recent poems with the politics of her native province represent a convincing vision. Selected Poems marries intellectual and emotional courage with vital language, startling but appropriate images, and beguiling art.
The sensual, rhapsodic implications of her early work and the engagement of more recent poems with the politics of her native province represent a convincing vision. Selected Poems marries intellectual and emotional courage with vital language, startling but appropriate images, and beguiling art.
94 pages, Paperback
First published January 28, 1997
121 people want to read
About the author
Medbh McGuckian
46 books24 followersMedbh McGuckian was born in Belfast on 12 August 1950 and educated at a Dominican convent and Queen's University, Belfast. She has worked as a teacher and an editor and is a former Writer in Residence at Queen's University, Belfast (1985-8).
Her first published poems appeared in two pamphlets, Single Ladies: Sixteen Poems and Portrait of Joanna, in 1980, the year in which she received an Eric Gregory Award. In 1981 she co-published Trio Poetry 2 with fellow poets Damian Gorman and Douglas Marshall, and in 1989 she collaborated with Nuala Archer on Two Women, Two Shores. Medbh McGuckian's first major collection, The Flower Master (1982), which explores post-natal breakdown, was awarded a Rooney prize for Irish Literature, an Ireland Arts Council Award (both 1982) and an Alice Hunt Bartlett Award (1983). She is also the winner of the 1989 Cheltenham Prize for her collection On Ballycastle Beach.
Her honors also include the Bass Ireland Award for Literature, the Denis Devlin Award, and the American Ireland Fund’s Literary Award. She won the 2002 Forward Prize for Best Poem for “She Is in the Past, She Has This Grace.”
She edited The Big Striped Golfing Umbrella: Poems by Young People from Northern Ireland (1985) and co-translated, with Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, the Irish poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s collection The Water Horse (1999). She is the author of Horsepower Pass By! A Study of the Car in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (1999), and the poetry collection My Love Has Fared Inland (2010).
Her first published poems appeared in two pamphlets, Single Ladies: Sixteen Poems and Portrait of Joanna, in 1980, the year in which she received an Eric Gregory Award. In 1981 she co-published Trio Poetry 2 with fellow poets Damian Gorman and Douglas Marshall, and in 1989 she collaborated with Nuala Archer on Two Women, Two Shores. Medbh McGuckian's first major collection, The Flower Master (1982), which explores post-natal breakdown, was awarded a Rooney prize for Irish Literature, an Ireland Arts Council Award (both 1982) and an Alice Hunt Bartlett Award (1983). She is also the winner of the 1989 Cheltenham Prize for her collection On Ballycastle Beach.
Her honors also include the Bass Ireland Award for Literature, the Denis Devlin Award, and the American Ireland Fund’s Literary Award. She won the 2002 Forward Prize for Best Poem for “She Is in the Past, She Has This Grace.”
She edited The Big Striped Golfing Umbrella: Poems by Young People from Northern Ireland (1985) and co-translated, with Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, the Irish poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s collection The Water Horse (1999). She is the author of Horsepower Pass By! A Study of the Car in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (1999), and the poetry collection My Love Has Fared Inland (2010).
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 30, 2018
I had to read this collection for a poetics class. Reading it is like music; you can really get lost in the music of the verse and the imagery. But it is horrifying to analyze. It's an unending game of word associations, plays on words, puns, metaphors, and plagiarized passages of biographies. Reading it becomes an out of body experience that takes you on such a journey that it is painful and wonderful at the same time. Or maybe I'm just bad at poetry.
July 27, 2008
Medbh McGuckian and I are probably never going to be bff. Her poems are striking and beautiful, but I've read this whole collection twice now, and I am still not exactly sure what any particular poem is about. I am beginning to think I picked up a volume of cast-offs from her other collections. The poems are more atmospheric, mood pieces about feeling and subconscious rather than actual events or narrative. And they all run together so much so that I can't name a single one. I feel like I need to sit down with her analyst and have him/her explain them to me.
The only other time I've ever felt that maybe I wasn't smart enough for a book was reading Karl Kirchwey as a freshman, and even then, I was mostly sure what the poems were about or at least vaguely aware of who was speaking and where they were set. But I grew into his work as I read more classical literature. God willing that will happen with McGuckian too, but until then, I feel like she is going to be the Achilles' heel of my professional life.
The only other time I've ever felt that maybe I wasn't smart enough for a book was reading Karl Kirchwey as a freshman, and even then, I was mostly sure what the poems were about or at least vaguely aware of who was speaking and where they were set. But I grew into his work as I read more classical literature. God willing that will happen with McGuckian too, but until then, I feel like she is going to be the Achilles' heel of my professional life.
August 13, 2013
Every single poem is a pure art and beauty. I got goose bumps from beginning to end. I have never read such quaint, charming, pregnant similes and images before.
These are a bunch of sentences from her poem The Aisling Hat:
''Your Promethean head radiated
ash-blue quartz, your blue-black hair
some feathered, Paleolithic arrow head''
These are a bunch of sentences from her poem The Aisling Hat:
''Your Promethean head radiated
ash-blue quartz, your blue-black hair
some feathered, Paleolithic arrow head''
December 4, 2007
McGuckian is AMAZING. Those five stars are for her fabulousness. Language, metaphor, fire.
I'm actually sorry to have this book of selected poems rather than each individual book with all her poems.
I'm actually sorry to have this book of selected poems rather than each individual book with all her poems.
February 24, 2008
"there seems only to be this one way of happening,
and a poem to prove it has happened."
-from "Marconi's Cottage"
"...I could escape
from any other prison but my own
unjust pursuit of justice
that turns one sort of poetry into another."
-from "The Albert Chain"
November 14, 2007
Her writing gets better as the book (and time) progresses. Complex and beautiful. She is the queen of similes.
July 31, 2012
Read in '97. I have a terrible memory. I need to reread this one as well.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews