[In the following review, Wills surveys Marconi's Cottage, situating McGuckian's achievement within the context of twentieth-century European poetry.]

One of the questions currently much in vogue concerns our relative “Europeanness”, or lack of it. In keeping with the Republic of Ireland's recent affirmation of a European self-image, Medbh McGuckian in Marconi's Cottage stresses the importance of Ireland's links with European poetry. This was true of her last volume too, but whereas in On Ballycastle Beach (1988) her engagement with European poets (or poets who “chose” Europe, such as Byron) symbolized through the language of flags and national tongues the political possibilities for Ireland outside a relationship with Britain, this volume is more concerned with the nature of the poetic gift and the value of poetry itself.

This is a rich and authoritative collection, containing some of McGuckian's finest poems to date, and continuing her exploration of the traditions of modern lyric poetry. The Europeans most in evidence are Tsvetaeva (the poet whom, in spirit if not in form, McGuckian most resembles), Mandelstam, Rilke and, of course, Marconi, who is to some extent given honorary status as a poet in this volume. Why Marconi? Well, his mother was half Irish, and he married an Irishwoman, but more importantly, in 1898, in a two-roomed rudimentary cottage in Ballycastle, on the North Coast of Ireland, he experimented with sending radio waves across the sea to Rathlin Island. The cottage, then, is not symbolic but real, and McGuckian really owns it. And why a poet? Much of the symbolism in this book involves images of seas and houses: chaos and nature as opposed to civilization, order, art and meaning. Marconi harnessing of electro-magnetic waves suggests a means of communicating between these two principles, as also between body and spirit, and from soul to soul. To some extent, the wave theory is offered ironically, as a kind of technological advance on Tsvetaeva's “lyrical wires”, through which, while in Germany, she dreamed of communication with Pasternak in Russia. Many of the poems in Marconi's Cottage are concerned with the possibility of dreams and intuitive understanding between women (one of the striking departures in this book is the prevalence of female addressees): foetus, daughter, mother and other writers.

The collection can be roughly divided into three parts: an initial sequence of poems focuses on the conflict between motherhood and artistic creativity—the claims of differing types of fertility. This is followed by a sequence celebrating the birth of a daughter and a series of uplifting poems asserting the productivity of both types of creation and affirming the mutual dependency of the poetic and the quotidian. These are complex and difficult poems, but guidelines are given, not only through the by now familiar use of a shaping, albeit plastic, symbolism, but also through what appear to be certain key references. There are pointers to Patrick Kavanagh, to Sylvia Plath, to Mandelstam's poem “Silentium” and Rilke's “Requiem for a Friend”.

Take this last example: Rilke seems to be important partly because of his own ambiguous sexual upbringing (his mother dressed him in skirts and called him Sophie until he was two), and partly because of his sympathy with women artists, “handicapped” by their femininity. “Requiem” was written in memory of the artist Paula Modersohn Becker, who died in childbirth—in it the death of the true artist is imaged as the breaking of a mirror through motherhood, rendering her unable to “close” herself and recreate the perfect, disinterested reflection of the world. McGuckian discusses the complex gendering of the artist in several poems, and laments the damage that fertility can do to the mirror: “A thin rain borrowed my silver”, rendering her mere glass. But she also tries to count the cost of the preservation of the self-reflecting mirror which cannot countenance the woman's desire to become a mirror for others, specifically by bearing children. So “Journal Intime” (a kind of bodily diary) evokes the womb as Plato's cave containing an imagined child:

I am a Platonic admirer of her
Flowing Watteau gowns, the volume
Of Petrarch in her lap. It is so
Unthinkable she should look outward
From the depressed, pink light of her
One-time nursery, if only to dilate
Upon the same two faces, if only, upon the snow.
In a child's first (and most satisfying)
House, where everyone is repeated
In everyone else, the door that is so light
To her, so dark to us, is wise enough
To dream through. Her voice fills the mouth
Of her own mirror, as if she were a failure:
As if, what is lifelike, could be true.

As is clear from these lines, McGuckian's poetry is “translation” in more ways than one—not simply of Rilke's images into her own terms, but of ordinary objects and everyday events into an “otherworldly” realm. Not only the poet's body, but the objects with which she engages (which she mirrors) are given back to the world as strangers.

The charge that this is narcissistic or self-obsessed writing, interested only in the vagaries of the lyrical “I”, needs therefore to be put into perspective. It cannot be denied that McGuckian likes to “explain” her poems as the pages torn out of a diary, or as personal letters sent to those around her, and in particular to other poets (hence her interest in “lyrical waves”). But the poetry itself steadfastly refuses to be read in such a way, not only because it repeatedly signals its creative engagement with a European poetic tradition, but also because the self which is deemed to structure the work is, in fact, all but destroyed by it. McGuckian's lyrical “I” is continually changing shape, parcelled out in a dialogue between mother and child, masculine and feminine principles or parts of the self (German and Russian help her here, because of their linguistic gendering of objects), even between a heart on the left and one on the right (since pregnancy gives a woman “two hearts”). While all this could be construed as the exploration of a divided psyche at a more fundamental level questions are being posed about the nature of home. Home may indeed be where we start from but, for McGuckian, it is always insecure, invaded and disrupted: “a horizontal cutting / That has always already begun”. To read this as autobiographical poetry, obscurely concerned with domestic life, mistakes the extent to which the home, the family, the mother tongue and the nation are each torn away from their traditional representations and scattered into wild and undomesticated elements.

Moreover, the overwhelming feeling is one of affirmation of this internal exile, and a refusal to ignore its violence. “The Unplayed Rosalind”, for example, reminds us that “I have lived on a war footing”. The poem finds the bloody evidence of that war, as well as culture's other product, writing, in the most natural, the most intimate of spheres, the womb:

The room which I thought the most beautiful
In the world, and never showed to anyone.
Is a rose-red room, a roseate chamber.
It lacks two windowpanes and has no waterjug.
There is red ink in the inkwell.

Thus the oppositions between culture and nature, house and sea, order and chaos are never stable: the interpenetration between them is recognized in the triumphant title-poem, with its glancing reference to Marconi's work: “It is as if the sea had spoken in you / And then the words had dried”.

Electro-magnetic waves are an apt image for McGuckian here since not only do they represent a kind of dry fluidity, but they also carry sound—voice and music, from which poetry is created. Many of the poems contain images of the substance of the atmosphere, and the tangibility of sound—the new-born child is “deluged with the dustless air”, and in “Oval of a Girl” the child

                    might just as well have been water
Breaking and mending with a dark little
                                                                                movement.
A kind of forlorn frenzy leaking over into sound …

In keeping with this emphasis on balance, order and architecture, many of the poems are less syntactically complex and demanding of the reader's ingenuity than some of McGuckian's earlier work. They are also more diverse, experimenting with verse forms and framing narratives such as the fairy-tale or dream vision. The whole of this collection reveals a degree of control, assuredness and intellectual courage rare in contemporary poetry.