[In the following review, Wills evaluates the style and themes of Shelmalier.]

Some years ago, the Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian made the startling confession that “I began to write poetry so that nobody would read it. Even the ones who read it would not understand it, and certainly no other poet would understand it”. There could hardly be better ammunition for those who accuse contemporary poets of wilful obscurity. And even readers sympathetic to McGuckian must sometimes find themselves fighting off a sense of exasperation. Take these lines from “Shelmalier”, the title poem of her new book:

Looked after only by the four womb-walls,
if anything curved in the ruined city his last hour
it was his human hands, bituminous, while all
                                                                                                              laws
were aimed at him, returning to the metre of a
                                                                                                              star:
like a century about to be over, a river trying
to film itself, detaching its voice from itself,
he qualified the air of his own dying,
his brain in folds like the semi-open rose of grief.

If, like me, you are clueless as to what these lines might be about, the safest response may be to stop trying to make sense. Perhaps we should simply enjoy the unexpected shifts; the flow of evocative images. Yet the most provoking thing about McGuckian's work is that there seems to be more to it than this. We catch glimpses of a pattern of meaning, albeit one which we can scarcely decipher. The difficulty is not just syntactical—although there's plenty of that—but that McGuckian appears to be relying on some hermetic scheme of reference. Maybe it would all add up, if we could only find the key. Perhaps, in some other world, those tantalizing veiled correspondences might suddenly become clear.

One way of accounting for the extreme difficulty of McGuckian's work has been through notions of “feminine language”. She has a loyal following among women readers, for whom this fluid, densely metaphorical poetry offers a powerful representation of distinctively female experiences, in particular those of childbirth and motherhood. Yet this approach to McGuckian, which assumes that the tenor of her work is predominantly confessional or autobiographical, doesn't take us far. This is not just because, in truth, the poems seem to hold back as much as they reveal about the author. More importantly, it misses the densely literary and allusive nature of the writing.

There has been some controversy recently over McGuckian's reliance on literary essays and biographies. Whole poems may be assembled out of interwoven quotations, leading some readers to question their originality. Certainly, McGuckian's previous books have engaged in an ambitious dialogue with writers such as Mandelstam, Rilke, above all Tsvetaeva (the poet McGuckian most resembles). But while persistence can untangle these connections, Shelmalier poses difficulties of another order. Even the most well-read critic will find the book tough going, since the texts with which it is intertwined are the various histories of the 1798 United Irishmen rebellion, and the writings and speeches of the protagonists themselves.

The title of the volume itself is a conundrum. The work derives from a name for and Irish clan in Wexford, the sìol malure, a people who were wiped out by repeated English incursions into the county. It was anglicized as the name of a barony in Wexford during the Ordnance Survey of Ireland in the early nineteenth century. The name appears in two well-known nineteenth-century ballads commemorating 1798. In one song celebrating the actions of the warrior-priest Father John Murphy, it's the name of the place in Wexford where the rebels gathered before their successful attack on Wexford Town; in the other, it's a term for a member of the peasant insurgency (“What's the news, what's the news, O my bold Shelmalier?”). There were, apparently, Shelmaliers on both sides, both yeomen and peasantry, and it may be this ambiguity, as much as anything else, which draws McGuckian to the name. Either way, the term is firmly associated with the rebellion in Wexford, in the Irish Republic, which was echoed by a rising of the Unitedmen in Ulster.

So we can glean, at least, that the fundamental gesture of the volume is inclusive. Shelmalier links Irish and English, North and South, the present Troubles and the past. It also breaches the confessional divide. Like Tom Paulin in his 1986 volume Liberty Tree—though the poetry itself couldn't be further from Paulin's blend of toughness and clarity—McGuckian's imagination is caught by the confluence of Presbyterian and Catholic in the rebellion. It is the Protestant leaders of the United Irishmen, Theobald Wolfe Tone, Lord Edward Fitzgerald and, later, Robert Emmet, whose declarations echo obliquely through McGuckian's lines. In “The Feastday of Peace”, McGuckian is-called by the dead, who offer guidance to the poet:

Deep in time's turnings
and the overcrowded soil
too familiar to be seen,
the long, long dead
steer with their warmed breath
my unislanded dreams.

Shelmalier, we might conjecture, is an act of remembrance—one which also seeks to be an act of reconciliation. Apparently a meditation on suffering and failure, it nevertheless resonates with the new possibilities which the political détente of the 1990s has brought to Ireland.

But it would be a mistake to overstress the political earnestness of the book. Take the mischievous historical double-exposures, for example, 1998 looks back not only to 1798, but also to another fin de siècle, that of the 1890s. The painting on the front cover is a late nineteenth-century scene of a woman tending a wounded poacher, and we are reminded that the two Shelmalier ballads are Victorian creations, not contemporary, with the uprising. McGuckian both foregrounds the sentimental images which filter our access to the past, and suggests it would be naive to think we could simply discard them. What we can do perhaps is rewrite them, just as McGuckian may be rewriting Yeatsian heroics as the wounded, feminized masculinity which the cover illustration depicts.

It is easy to overlook the playfulness of McGuckian's work. In the past, she has often turned tricks with etymology. Here she toys with the possibilities of traditional poetic forms and devices. Shelmalier incorporates sonnets, and even rhyming couplets, such as those of the introductory poem, “Script for and Unchanging Voice”:

The leaves are tongues whose years of blood are
                                                                                          locked
in the wrong house, time feels unclocked
or has been dead too long by now to cast
its freshly slaughtered shadow from the past.

Here the neatness and finality of the rhymes suggest the blockage of the future, both political and poetic. I can do things that way if you like, McGuckian seems to say, but it really won't get us very far. Yet rhyme is not just a clamp on innovation in Shelmalier, for McGuckian—more traditionally—also plays with rhyme as a way of reconciling disparate elements. Despite the obscurity of the lines I quoted at the beginning, we can make out in them the form of a half-rhyming octet. The sonnet to which they belong concludes almost exuberantly: “This great estrangement has the destination of a rhyme / The trees of his heart breathe regular in my dream.”

Estrangement as reconciliation, location as dislocation: McGuckian has always been concerned with ambiguous marginal states, with interiors which lie beyond, and invasions from within. In earlier books, these themes were often focused through bodily experience. But for McGuckian the intimate sphere is shot through with collective memory, and in Shelmalier the politics of memory comes to the fore.