[In the following essay, Murphy discusses McGuckian's method of composition and contrasts it with that of the poet Paul Muldoon.]

The poetry of Medbh McGuckian attracts even more vitriolic censure than [Paul] Muldoon's. Patrick Williams classifies her work as "colourful guff" (50), railing against her diaphanous and drifting lyrics (49). "McGuckian's concoctions of endless poeticism," he blusters, "are non-visionary, and the funny, sealed little worlds where harmless cranks parley with themselves in gobbledegook won't impinge on the real world of loot and dragons" (51). Such criticism of McGuckian's supposed morbid interiority and her consequent hermetic constructions is frequent: she has been labeled fey and mannered (Jenkins 56), whimsical (Lucas 38), at best intricate and enigmatic, at worst inaccessible and subjective (McCarthy 176).

I never write just blindly, I never sit down without an apparatus, I always have a collection of words—it's like a bird building a nest—I gather materials over the two weeks, or whatever. And I keep a notebook or a diary for the words which are happening to me and occuring to me. I never sit down without those because otherwise you would just go mad, trying to think of words.¹⁷

McGuckian's method of composition provides an insight into the oblique nature of her poetry. The "collection of words" is, in fact, a series of word-lists made up of phrases taken from literary biographers that she has been reading "over the two weeks." When writing a poem, she consults these lists and recombines the phrases to form poems. By manipulating words, fragments, and prior texts to fit neatly into her narratives, McGuckian imposes her own symbolic vision upon them, thereby forming a curious relationship with the reader, who must work hard to keep up with her. Whereas Muldoon foregrounds intertextuality through proper names, dates, and italics, McGuckian provides little indication that she is quoting or referring to other texts. In the following analysis of three poems—"Gigot Sleeves," "Garbo at the Gaumont," "A Small Piece of Wood"—I argue that McGuckian's poetry functions as a palimpsestic double-writing. In these works, quotations gleaned from literary biographies are recycled to suggest the poet's immediate relationship with her precursors. Like Muldoon's historiographie metafictions, the doubleness associated with a palimpsest permits McGuckian to retain vestiges of prior writings while including a critique or commentary on them: "[a]t all times in a palimpsest there is foreground and background, new statement and obscured original which can be discovered with the force of a revelation or something left overwritten in undecidable layering" (DuPlessis 56). For the poet, such a layered composition initiates a personal relationship to a literary precursor, a relationship wholly dissimilar to that established by literary biographers whose words she reproduces:

They are only looking at the person's body and physical mind and events and doings—I am for their seed and their undying immortal flame. So I recreate … or God through me. I hope to restore to life, and make empty words full. In the text the phrases are not poetry—linked properly in the DNA of the poem—they ought to be. They are intended to be.¹⁸

Although McGuckian distances herself from her biographical sources, she still uses their words; therefore, we must ask whether or not McGuckian's verse really does have an "imaginative signature," the unique "poetic DNA pattern" she claims for it.¹⁹ The answer lies in the image itself. The genetic makeup of McGuckian's poems have an inherent doubleness, forming what Michael Davidson has termed a palimtext. Foregrounding intertextual and interdiscursive aspects, Davidson suggests that a palimtext is "a writing-in-process," which "retains vestiges of prior writings out of which it emerges"; more importantly, "it is the still-visible record of responses to those early texts" (310).

In an unpublished interview with Jennifer Noble, McGuckian reveals that she wrote "Gigot Sleeves" to pay homage to the enigmatic nineteenthcentury Yorkshire poet/novelist, Emily Brontë (Noble 48). However, once the poem appears in print it becomes more than an intimate one-to-one conversation across time between authors and, in the process, raises questions about obliquity. "I do publish," says McGuckian, "because I want to, obviously. But only to those who themselves want a relationship to Emily Brontë. I want them to know her, not the way that I do, but in their own way. I would offer the poem as a clue to rediscovering her, to go back and find out more about her for themselves" (Noble 48). Surprisingly Noble does not query this aim since, without McGuckian's stated intentions, the reader would scarcely suspect Brontë's presence. Indeed, the poem's only named literary references are to Trelawney and Shelley. Furthermore, as the following passage from the poem's conclusion illustrates, the temporal specificity conjoined with the hermetic aspect of her imagery helps obscure even further its unidentified subject:

And everything is emaciated—the desk
On her knees, the square of carpet, the black
Horsehair sofa, and the five foot seven by sixteen

Inches of a pair of months stopped.

Until readers discover that McGuckian has "borrowed" the above from Winifred Gérin's compelling biography of Emily Brontë, they will be forever left to puzzle over such a conundrum as "the five foot seven by sixteen / Inches of a pair of months." Gérin's narrative recounts how Brontë's illness, "its relentless progress, the emaciation, the fever, the shortness of breath, the pain in the side, all confirmed the family's terrors of worse to come" (248, emphasis added). Her death was, according to Dr. Wheelhouse, due to '"Consumption—2 months' duration'" (259, emphasis added) and the dimensions of her coffin are recorded as "5 feet 7 inches by 16 inches" (259).

…..

When composing "Gigot Sleeves" McGuckian, to use Maura Dooley's words, "reei[s]in / life with someone else's bait" (12). Taking five excerpts from the above passage, she quotes them in the second, third, and tenth stanzas of her poem, insisting at all times on the cramped nature of Emily Brontë's surroundings. Even the one seemingly incongruous detail, "the black horsehair sofa," is taken from a passage to do with the writer's increasing frailty.²⁰ By stressing the phrase "a pair of months," McGuckian echoes Gérin's realization that Brontë's contracting tuberculosis was far from inevitable during her long illness.

In "Gigot Sleeves," McGuckian is open to the criticism that Tim Kendall²¹ leveled at Paul Muldoon's "7, Middagh Street." In both instances, the literary allusions place a heavy burden on the reader. To be intelligible, Muldoon's poem requires knowledge of Humphrey Carpenter's W.H. Auden: A Biography; similarly, the reader who fails to recognize McGuckian's debt to Gérin misses the homage paid to Brontë. Yet however oblique her strategy may be, McGuckian's treatment of her subject remains very different from that of the biographer. The poet's economic appropriation of text enables her not only to explore certain root causes of Emily Brontë's demise (the austere living conditions at Haworth parsonage, the stubborn neglect of her health), but also to depict them formally. Indeed, the dimensions of her coffin are juxtaposed with the size of Emily's living space: while William Wood, the village carpenter, says that "he had never in all his experience made so narrow a shell for an adult" (Gérin 259), McGuckian implies that the coffin differed little from the room in which she wrote. Emily Brontë's emaciation parallels that of the house ("the / Narrow sliproom," "the square of carpet"); the gradual disappearance of both writer and building is figured literally in the enjambement at the poem's close whereby one swiftly moves from "five foot seven by sixteen" to "Inches of a pair of months" to "stopped." Never has closure seemed so final.

Many of McGuckian's borrowings from Gérin deliberately set up a particular image of Emily Brontë, one which counters preconceived notions of her as a sheltered recluse, and offers instead the portrayal of a lively engaging woman: "The double-cherry performs a dance behind / Triple gauze, she takes out the bulldogs, / Masters a pistol…."

…..

McGuckian's meticulous description of Emily Brontë's clothing—the skirts splashed with "purple suns"—appears more appropriate to the posthippie generation of the early 1970s²² than to Victorian England. Yet this is part of the "rediscovery" of Brontë the poet fosters, which is based on ample biographical evidence. In her biography, Gérin quotes an excerpt from The Life of Charlotte Brontë, in which Mrs. Gaskell recounts that when Brontë was staying at the Hotel de Hollande, I Rue de la Putterie, she "had taken a fancy to the fashion, ugly and preposterous even during its reign, of gigot sleeves, and persisted in wearing them long after they were 'gone out'. Her petticoats, too, had not a curve or a wave in them, but hung straight and long, clinging to her lank figure" (Gérin 131, emphasis added).

That Mcguckian's Emily Brontë—the tragic, "half-untamed," solitary figure—is reminiscent of a Romantic, Byronic hero reflects a commonplace biographical assumption of Byron's profound influence on the Yorkshire writer.²³ In personal correspondence McGuckian reveals that "I was re-reading Byron and found again 'a spreading here, a condensation there' which I used in 'Gigot Sleeves'. I suggest she (Emily Brontë) was more Byron than he."²⁴ Her characterization of Brontë also reflects Gérin's view that "Emily Brontë was no plagiarist; few novelists were so original as she. What she took from Byron she took because the seed lay in her" (46). Although McGuckian could also be accused of plagiarism, her completely original treatment of her subject refutes such an imputation. Gérin's emphasis on Brontë's originality surely lies behind McGuckian's allusion in the eighth stanza of "Gigot Sleeves" to Edward Trelawney's Recollections:²⁵

The funeral pyre was now ready; I applied the fire, and the materials being dry and resinous the pine-wood burnt furiously, and drove us back. It was hot enough before, there was no breath of air, and the loose sand scorched our feet. As soon as the flames began to clear, and allowed us to approach, we threw frankincense and salt into the furnace, and poured a flask of wine and oil over the body, (emphasis added)

Within the framework of the poem, the reference functions proleptically, prefiguring the death of the female poet; but within the wider context of McGuckian's obvious concern with the anxiety of influence, the ritual of burning the dead poet's body could suggest her attempt at poetic originality, free from any precursor's influence. Yet this reading begs the question: while Brontë may have fully internalized and personalized the influence of Byron, has McGuckian's creativity, as "poetic biographer," suffered while reading the lives of others?

The words are given to me … and the authors, and the translators, especially if they're dead, they are very aware of me using them and they want it; they want me to make the same words live again in a new way and do things with them that carries me and marks my reading of the book and marks my learning process with them.²⁶

By embedding or dovetailing quotations within her own work McGuckian offers more than a belated tribute to admired authors; the technique also registers her own continuing engagement with their oeuvres and lives. The reading process is both immediate and personal, involving a connection with the writers who, because of the poet's empathy with their words, become living presences. In the same interview McGuckian stated matter-of-factly that "When I'm with a person that's written the book, I'm almost in love with the person during the course of that book." She cites an example making this relationship startlingly clear: "I got two books out on Byron. One of them neither gave me Byron nor the other man, and the other book gave me both Byron and the person writing it. When I go home and I pick up the book, it's very like getting into bed with the other person—it's very, very intimate."

In "Garbo at the Gaumont," a minor poem in which McGuckian empathizes with yet another precursor, the title itself contains a tantalizingly indirect hint as to whom this might be. McGuckian has based much of her poem on Tatyana Tolstoy's biography of her father, Tolstoy Remembered. An essay by her daughter, Tatyana Albertini,²⁷ which acts as an epilogue for the biography, clarifies McGuckian's title for her poem:

I only once saw her perplexed. There was a film of Anna Karenina, the one starring Greta Garbo, showing at one of the big Paris cinemas. My mother, a cousin, and I decided to go and see it. But when we arrived at the Gaumont-Palace box-office we had to give up the notion, since the prices were way above our means, and we were forced to trudge sadly home again. When we got back, my mother said with a sweet and disappointed little smile: "I wonder what papa would have said if he'd seen that. Or the sight of me sweeping the floor, doing my shopping, and not knowing if I'll have enough left to pay the rent." (249)

The poem shares with Tatyana Tolstoy's reminiscences a wry intelligence that masks the surface capitulation to patriarchy. For example, towards the end of the first stanza, the speaker in "Garbo at the Gaumont" notes the debilitating effects that child-care has upon the writing of poetry:

… till the room that was like
A garden where he took his first
Steps, and lit up trees, wishes
Not to go on the move, to leave
Its book unread, unfinished,
Like a true woman.

Ironically, this particular "room" (the biography) has been read from cover to cover by the poet. Despite the distractions of caring for children, she has written a poem about her experience, which recalls a passage in Tolstoy's text. Attempting to overcome her father's nearsighted prejudices about women writers, Tolstoy tricks him into believing that an article she had written, summarizing the principles of the American economist Henry George, had in fact been produced by a certain "P. Polilov." Taken in by the ruse, her father stubbornly maintains that a woman cannot produce a sustained, booklength version of the article:

As the conversation came to an end my father began to chuckle and said: "But how sad about poor Polilov! And I'd formed such a clear picture of him too: he wore a dark blue jacket, really very dapper, in early middle age …"

Then stroking my hair he added:

"Well, if you don't finish your book, then we shall be able to say you are a true woman." Alas, I was to prove that I was indeed an authentic member of my sex. Like a true woman I have left my book unfinished to this day …" (164, emphasis added)

Although she may have never finished that particular economic treatise, Tolstoy did go on to write the biography.

Despite the often productive comparisons which can be made between the two texts, "Garbo at the Gaumont" illustrates McGuckian using a biography haphazardly, almost as if she has chosen her intertexts more for their aural effect than for any semantic value. One striking example is her reference to the room in which Leo Tolstoy wrote his epic War and Peace:

… As the eyelid protects
The eye, in a house that love has borrowed,
never to be refurnished, none can tell
Exactly what room was used for what,
Until the day after the day after tomorrow.

McGuckian has, in fact, metaphorically refurnished the "house" in Yasnaya Polyana, by inserting a quotation from Tatyana Tolstoy's work into her own poem: "We imagined we were exploring the rooms my father had described in his novel," says Tolstoy, "and we argued passionately over exactly which room had been used for what, as though the Rostovs had been actual people who really lived there once" (144, emphasis added). Yet for all her borrowings, McGuckian fails to capture either the spirit of Tatyana Tolstoy or comment on her own poetics. The poem is, thus, inferior to a later text in Marconi's Cottage based on the same source, "A Small Piece of Wood."

In "A Small Piece of Wood," the rare inclusion of a footnote affords readers a fleeting glimpse of the familiar ghosts that glide between the interstices of this text: "'Choorka', one of [Leo] Tolstoy's pet-names for his daughter, is translated to give the poem its title" (MC 110). McGuckian's characteristic trope of doubleness indicates that she is again creating a palimpsest by taking the following images from Tatyana Tolstoy's text, and thus emphasizing the parallels:

On my left two rivers flowed
Together without mingling,
As though someone had unrolled
Two different ribbons side by side …

Describing a journey taken to Samara in the summer of 1873, Tolstoy remarks:

After Kazan I saw something very strange: the Volga had grown even wider, and on our left the water was sharply divided into two completely distinct strips of colour, as though someone had unrolled two ribbons side by side, one blue and the other yellow. This was the place where the Kama flows into the Volga, and although there was no physical barrier between the two currents they flowed on for a great distance without mingling, so that you could still distinguish the one from the other by their colour. (109, emphasis added)

The footnote focuses the reader's attention wholly on the speaker's adoption of Tatyana's soubriquet, thereby establishing a salient parallel between two father-daughter relationships. In its original context, 'Choorka' acts as a testament to the enduring love of Tatyana Tolstoy for an inspiring paternal figure:

He used to call me 'Choorka' [a small piece of wood], and I loved that nickname because he always used it when he was in a good mood and wanted to tease me or be nice to me.

The extraordinarily strong feeling of love and veneration I felt for my father never faded. From what I remember, and also what I have been told, he too always felt a particular affection for me. (35)

McGuckian's insertion of the same pet name into an alternative context maintains the literal theme of filial devotion (for her own father). But its status as intertext enables her metaphorically to incorporate the additional theme of literary paternity.

Discussing the psychology of intrapoetic relationships, Harold Bloom contends that to overcome the anxiety of influence and "clear an imaginative space for themselves" (5), "strong" poets always begin by misreading their precursors. Yet McGuckian suggests that while she seeks to revivify the words of past authors, her poetry is not identical with Bloom's "act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation" (30). As already noted, McGuckian insists, rather, that her quotations make the same words live again in a different context. McGuckian's text is an account of her "learning process," and the selection and subsequent rearrangement of words taken from literary works are tasks for which she deems herself elected. While such a belief may indicate an abdication of control on her part, McGuckian's palimpsestic rewriting often centers thematicaliy on the very notion of "power" and reconfigures the allocated gender positions of the original text.

Every apple is a feather-room
For seed's infectious star, and every man
Who calls a woman 'Choorka',
For a hundred and eight ruled pages.

The "apple" calls to mind the poem's earlier images of learning (the "lesson-filled inkwell," "Pictures in children's books") since the first letter of the English alphabet is traditionally represented in elementary textbooks as an "apple," to enable the child to discover the function of the abstract signifier, "A." In the final stanza, however, while the "apple" is likened to "a feather-room," suggesting incubation and materials for flight, its effect is decidedly ambiguous: "infectious star" can indeed suggest an enthusiasm which spurs the child on to growth (from seed to star, progressing upwards), but "infectious" hints at a more pernicious influence. The "star" no longer implies that destiny is due to nature, but, rather, to nurture. This ambiguity continues into the final two lines. Whereas the original context in Tolstoy Remembered insists upon an unqualified affection for the father, in its translated form "Choorka" ("a small piece of wood") suggests the demeaning ways in which this love was often reciprocated (as demonstrated in "Garbo at the Gaumont"). In her one "hundred and eight ruled pages,"²⁸ McGuckian attempts to counter the effects of patriarchal "rule" by gender-swapping and symbolically bestowing the mantle of the male literary figure (Leo Tolstoy) onto the female (Tatyana Tolstoy). This she has done in the first stanza:

On the secret shelves of weather,
With its few rhymes, in a pause
Of blood, I closed the top
Of my lesson-filled inkwell,
A she-thing called a poetess,
Yeoman of the Month.

McGuckian puts immense strain on words. By means of telegraphic-like compression, the temporal and biological aspects of "a pause of blood" suggest at once female menstruation, kinship (father-daughter), and the interiorization of natural forces. Indeed, the speaker manages to domesticate nature ("secret shelves of weather") and, suggesting a similitude with art ("With its few rhymes"), goes on to interiorize and textualize nature until it becomes enclosed in her "lesson-filled inkwell." Most striking, however, is the ambiguous gender of the speaker, at once a "poetess" and a "Yeoman." In the original context (autumn 1872), the action of closing an inkwell is Tatyana's attempt to shield her written thoughts from the prying eyes of her father:

While we were writing papa came in. He leaned over me to look at my dictation. Noticing that I was closing my inkwell every time I dipped my pen in it, he asked me why I was doing it.

"The ink evaporates," I said.

"Evaporates?" papa repeated in astonishment.

"Yes," I insisted stubbornly. "I close the inkwell so the ink won't evaporate and get wasted."

Papa said nothing. But next time I offered him an equally absurd and untrue explanation of my behaviour he murmured:

"Yes, the ink evaporates …"

Why didn't I tell him the truth? That I was simply engaging in a perfectly innocent experiment? I think it was because I didn't want anyone—even the nearest and dearest to me—penetrating my inner world. I had locked myself away in my own solitude and I didn't want to share my thoughts and feelings, however insignificant, with anyone at all. (Tatyana Tolstoy 95-96, emphasis added)

McGuckian admits her own related desire for secrecy in a remarkable conversation with Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill: "I began to write poetry so that nobody would read it. Nobody. Even the ones who read it would not understand it, and certainly no other poet would understand it."²⁹ Yet in "A Small Piece of Wood," McGuckian publicly reveals this need, thus paradoxically contradicting the desire for privacy she asserts. But her concealed use of Tolstoy's biography masks the real narrative—the usurpation of the (literary) father:

In pale frock and raspberry
Boots, my waist the circumference
Of no more than two oranges,
I rode out to hunt….

The frequent intersections of McGuckian's poem with Tatyana Tolstoy's biography creates a doubled speaking self, but the gender of the figure who rides Out to hunt is the androgynous poetess/Yeoman of the Month. The passage in the biography from which the above images emerge³⁰ reveals the simultaneous birth of the writer and the symbolic (though also painfully literal) fall of her father; thus the poet overcomes the anxiety of influence:

I was born at Yasnaya Polyana on October 4th 1864. Several days beforehand my father had been thrown in a riding accident. Still a young man then, he loved hunting, especially for foxes and hares in the autumn. So on September 26th 1864 he took his pack of borzois and rode out to hunt on a young and spirited mare named Mashka. Some distance from the house he started a great russet hare in a field and immediately set on his hounds. "Follow! Follow!" he yelled, and urged his mount after the bounding hare. Whereupon Mashka, an inexperienced hunter but only too eager to go, was soon launched into an all-out gallop. A dry water-course appeared across her path. She failed to clear it, stumbled, and fell on to her knees. Then, instead of pulling herself to her feet again, she toppled heavily over on to her flank. My father fell with her, and his right arm was trapped so that it took the mare's full weight. (17, emphasis added)

The palimpsestic double writing here allows McGuckian to insert herself into a poetic tradition from which she feels excluded: "it could be argued that far from this being a practice [quoting] that should be frowned on, it is a legitimate one for males and has a long respected and encouraged tradition and is one that women must themselves incorporate if they are to become part of the poetic tradition."³¹

The poems of McGuckian and Muldoon share a high degree of intellectual rigor, forcing the reader outside the texts for clarifications of meaning. By failing to indicate clearly from which text she is quoting, McGuckian places a larger burden on the reader than Muldoon, but neither poet can be accused of "cliquish nonchalance." The benefits of their obliquity are manifold: not only do they pay literary tribute to their esteemed precursors, but the appropriated texts also provide both poets with a critical shorthand to mark their own rereading of these texts. Muldoon's historiographical metafictions embrace the dialogical potential of the postmodern text; allusions self-reflexively manifest their status as intertexts and thus encourage readers to produce readings located in between the present poem and past context. While McGuckian's palimpsestic double-writing does not so readily proclaim its status as intertext, it allows her to address her own position as a female poet in a patriarchal tradition.

NOTES

¹⁵ See Jefferson's message to Congress, 18 January 1803 (Jackson II), and his letter to Lewis, 20 June 1803 (Jackson 63).

¹⁶ For the prevalence of "savagism" as a concept in America, see Prucha 8.

¹⁷ Medbh McGuckian, personal interview, 28 July 1995.

¹⁸ McGuckian, personal correspondence, 21 January 1997.

¹⁹ See Seamus Heaney 6-7.

²⁰ Gérin 259: "About noon Emily was visibly worse and her sisters urged her to bed. The only concession she would make was to lie down on the sofa—the black horsehair sofa that can still be seen today" (emphasis added).

²¹ See Kendall, Paul Muldoon, 125-26.

²² Hence the reference to "fifteen years ago"—the poem was first published in 1988.

²³ See especially chapter 3 of Stevie Davies, Emily Bronte, 23.

²⁴ McGuckian, personal correspondence, 27 July 1996.

²⁵ Trelawny quoted in Morpugo 88.

²⁶ McGuckian, personal interview at The Marine Hotel, Ballycastle, 19 August 1996.

²⁷ See Tatyana Albertini, "I Often Think of My Mother," Tolstoy Remembered, 245-52.

²⁸ In the Gallery Press version of Marconi's Cottage the poems are printed on 108 pages. In its original draft, "A Small Piece of Wood" was handwritten on ruled paper.

²⁹ See McGuckian, "Comhrá," 590.

³⁰ The vivid description of her clothing comes from Sofia Behrs's [Tatyana Tolstoy's mother's] story about a masked ball held to mark Twelfth Night, 1865, at which she wore "boots with raspberry tops" (23-24).