What do you think?
Rate this book
Marconi's Cottage
In the deft and mysterious poems of Marconi’s Cottage, McGuckian evokes the uncanny presence of a muse whose “unseduceable two rows of small black doors” hinge life and death, the two sides of a single page, views from a room that faces in and out.
- GenresPoetry
110 pages, Paperback
Published July 1, 1992
26 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).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 10, 2011
Had the joy of hearing her read at the University of Edinburgh in 2001. I'm infinitely inspired by her poems and came back to this book for some inspiration. Some of my favorite lines:
"It was a hopelessly /ill-advised summer"
"but getting dark/is the world's fault"
"I saw you as a lake,/ I dined on your sap as on a sound fruit"
"Winter was a page that asked to be written on"
"The snowstorm I described to you six men ago,
When I fastened myself open like a grave
Or even more like a house, for the wrong man."
"light, like a defect, cut the rain"
"Upstairs above my head lives someone
Who repeats my movements with her double
Weeping."
"The three worlds of your hand,
Your earth-hand, water-hand, your
Unsubstantial hand, are woven afresh
Into the texture of this world."
"It was a hopelessly /ill-advised summer"
"but getting dark/is the world's fault"
"I saw you as a lake,/ I dined on your sap as on a sound fruit"
"Winter was a page that asked to be written on"
"The snowstorm I described to you six men ago,
When I fastened myself open like a grave
Or even more like a house, for the wrong man."
"light, like a defect, cut the rain"
"Upstairs above my head lives someone
Who repeats my movements with her double
Weeping."
"The three worlds of your hand,
Your earth-hand, water-hand, your
Unsubstantial hand, are woven afresh
Into the texture of this world."
February 18, 2024
I love this book so hard. It's like reading the poems I wish I could write. All together. I had to read it slowly, about five poems at a time because each is so dense with images and switchbacks that you're like what just happened? I don't even know but I know I loved it.
August 29, 2015
An utterly magical book. I keep coming back to it.
June 6, 2024
An utterly magical book. I keep coming back to it.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews