[In the following essay, Blakeman studies the role of metaphor and metonymy in McGuckian's poetry with respect to the theories of American linguist Roman Jakobson and French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan on the same topics.]

What this essay offers is not a definitive way to read a McGuckian poem, as not only is this an unfeasible task but it would compromise McGuckian's deliberate refusal of a single voiced, univocal reading. Rather, what this essay provides is a consideration of McGuckian's application of metaphor and metonymy in relation to the work of Roman Jakobson and Jacques Lacan, which takes into account the indeterminacy and displacement of meaning that is a predominant feature of her work. Roman Jakobson's study ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’ led to the formulation of the metaphoric and metonymic axis of language, a formulation which significantly influenced Lacan, for like Lacan, Jakobson's focus rests ‘not on the object of reference, but on the relations of the signifying elements in the sign itself’.¹ A brief overview of Jakobson's study is thus both valuable in relation to McGuckian's poetry and provides the foundation from which a movement into a Lacanian reading becomes possible.

Jakobson's distinction between metaphor and metonymy is founded on the Saussurean differentiation between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations between signs. When we compose a sentence we employ both the practices and conventions of grammatical regulations (the syntagmatic chain of combination and contiguity), and make choices regarding the possible variations between signs at each moment of composition (the more flexible paradigmatic chain of selection and substitution). Jakobson aligned the process of selection and substitution with metaphor, and combination and contiguity with metonymy, claiming that both are needed for meaningful communication and constitute the axis on which all language rests. Jakobson also maintained, however, that as much can be learned from linguistic communication when it ceases to function effectively, as when it is intact. The impairment of the metonymic axis of language, states Jakobson, can lead to combination deficiency, a condition which privileges the paradigmatic dimension of language and suppresses the relation of contiguity between terms. For the combination aphasic, grammatical co-ordination and ties between terms are lost, resulting in word connections which defy rules of logic, or the absence of any interrelation between parts. In relation to the poetry of Medbh McGuckian, Jakobson's distinction between metaphor and metonymy is most informative when considered in relation to his discussion of ‘combination deficiency’. ‘The Long Engagement’ from McGuckian's early collection The Flower Master (first published in 1982) provides an apposite example of how Jakobson's work can inform an exploration into McGuckian's complex use of language.

Astonishment, surprise and confusion are characteristic effects of McGuckian's poetry, and metaphor is often employed to the detriment of grammatical regulations and metonymy. In ‘The Long Engagement’, the disjunctive ‘or’ and conjunctives such as ‘and’ are frequently omitted, creating a staccato run of clause elements, and a chain of images. The first stanza, for example, begins ‘In my all-weather loneliness I am like’,² a simile that is followed by three alternatives, given without any disjunctive or preference between them. The images evoke the feelings of hunger, loneliness, and emptiness, which prove pervasive throughout the poem. A lack of personal pronouns also attenuates the lack of clarity or stability within the text. The second stanza begins: ‘Occasionally, as Sunday silver, sit / In a quiet, eastward-facing room’. The alliteration of ‘Sunday silver, sit’ sounds phonetically harmonious and yet it somehow feels grammatically deviant. If it is read as a request, that one should occasionally sit in a quiet eastward-facing room, then it is grammatically accurate, and yet if it refers to an action regularly undertaken, then the lack of a personal pronoun creates the effect of grammatical in-completion. It is possible, however, that the initial ‘I’ of the first line functions as a delayed predicate indicated by the semi-colon after ‘kiss’, the ambiguity serving to destabilise the linearity of the reading process. The omission of the pronoun also accentuates the simile of being like a ‘dark cicada’ (an insect with transparent wings), and the vacuous ‘empty space’ from the previous stanza. The cicada also makes a loud and rhythmic chirping sound, thus providing an apposite metaphor for the persona of the poem who, as the poem unfolds, appears to be physically unsatisfied, and wishes to attract attention, if not physically, then audibly. The imagery evoked at the close of the second stanza marks the onset of the poem's progressive obscurity commencing with an enigmatic use of numbers:

And make a thread from the fibres of the five signs
Leading to the eight valleys, my lush palace gate.

(The Flower Master, 18)

The ‘five signs’ remain unnamed, yet the use of the definite article ‘the five signs’, distinguishes them from all others and imbues them with particular importance. The ‘fibres’ of these signs lead to the ‘eight valleys’ and ‘my lush palace gate’, an image that suggests both a mysterious and concealed location, and is invested with underlying sexual connotations. Marjorie Perloff's comment on the ‘Antipaysage’ in Rimbaud's Illuminations, provides an apposite gloss on the landscape evoked here by McGuckian. Perloff states:

These dream landscapes, at once present and absent, concrete and abstract, are composed of particulars that cannot be specified, of images that refuse to cohere in a consistent referential scheme.³

McGuckian's landscape, however, is even more indeterminate than Rimbaud's as it appears totally esoteric, without any identifiable referent, and furthermore, the persona is not merely contemplating the landscape but is physically part of it. The ‘Romantic distinction between subject and object […] collapses’ (Poetics, 59) with McGuckian's use of metaphor.

The second section of this poem is pervaded with personal recollections which are similarly imbued with sexual metaphoric undertones. Once again, there is a marked elimination of connectives, as the contextual relation between the images, and the integration and combination of terms, is given secondary consideration. The lack of connectives in conjunction with the enjambment over the stanza break compels the recollections to be read in rapid succession, as though each recollection is easily substituted by another from a potentially endless paradigmatic repertoire.

I lie down thirsty from the thunderstorm,
Visualising first this book, the objects on the tray,
Then you asleep, my loosening
Towards your pointed ceiling,
Through half-open lids your hand,
Repeat your name …

(The Flower Master, 18)

An atmosphere of tension between longing and frustration suffuses the lines, expressed through the metaphor of the persona ‘loosening’ towards the lovers ‘pointed ceiling’. There is similarly a (con)fusion between dreaming and nostalgia which intensifies the already pervasive ambiguity. The second section ends with the persona falling backwards ‘through the salted folds, the spring of your door’, implying the recollection of an orgasm, or conversely, a contemporaneous self-induced orgasm, experienced in the absence of the visualised other. The sexual imagery within this section suggests extreme frustration with an unconsummated love affair. Read in this context the title ‘The Long Engagement’ constitutes a deliberate play on words, the emphasis resting on ‘long’, infused with both a bitter and ironic tone. In an equally possible reading the overall poem expresses a lack of (sexual) satisfaction in marriage, the title once again providing an ironic gloss on a serious problem, the relationship resembling more an engagement (without sexual consummation), due to the lack of matrimonial intimacy.

The final section of ‘The Long Engagement’ retains the self-contained staccato images, and is increasingly devoid of lucidity. Metaphoric associations pervade the lines as the section begins ‘You overflow’ given without any indication of the context, although each metaphor is significantly imbued with sexual undertones as to provide the reader with an understated implication of what is being inferred. We are given three successive metaphors, each suggesting confinement and restriction in contrast to the ‘overflowing’ other:

My lap is bent upon itself, my bulbs
Are fleeced, my wishbone wings are tied.

(Flower Master, 19)

The poem's final stanza ends with an ambiguous metaphor in the form of a question. The persona asserts that ‘perhaps my worry beads need sanding’, the beads acting metaphorically for both the persona's emotions, and the female genitalia. The animated beads ‘ask’ to be ‘lifted from their winding / Cold, the subsidence of their avenues’, the enjambment skillfully splitting the clause. This device serves to create a disruption between the regional sense of the line and the wider syntactical sense, whereby the line sense indicates that ‘winding’ operates as a verb whilst the syntax sense destabilises this understanding by insisting ‘winding’ be read as an adjective appertaining to cold. Such ambiguity exemplifies how McGuckian problematises seemingly discrete and functional linguistic units. In relation to the persona's emotions this request can be read as a plea for warmth, contact, and security, and in relation to the overall theme of sexual longing, the poem concludes with a final plea for sexual fulfilment.

As I have exemplified, ‘The Long Engagement’, hovers between sense and non-sense, or as Thomas Docherty states ‘it is precisely at the moment of taking root, or of finding a single place from which to understand a poem, that it melts away again into ambivalence and ambiguity’.⁴ McGuckian's use of language manipulates stylistic techniques, displacing coherence and grammatical co-ordination. Identifications are primarily of a metaphoric kind, often alluding exclusively to each other, and working independent of the underlying context. Although McGuckian's poems share many points of contact with the combination aphasic, who is restricted within the paradigmatic axis of language, McGuckian is able to communicate in both metonymic and metaphoric terms: her poems do not entirely discard the activities of combination and contiguity. Rather, what McGuckian's poetry demonstrates is a concern for the code (the network of relations between words), rather than the message (the point of contact between words and meaning) or context. McGuckian's idiosyncratic use of the code, however, often problematises the clarity of the message, as the choice of words can make sense as a grammatical sequence (such as subject, verb, object), but, as with her use of metaphors, effect bizarre connections between terms. McGuckian undermines the reader's expected use of the code in relation to the message, rendering her, in Richard Bradford's terms, a ‘Jakobsonian poet’, who ‘deliberately and consciously creates imbalances between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic chains’, whilst remaining ‘capable of commanding and controlling the consequent effects’.⁵

Lacan builds on Jakobson's distinction between metaphor and metonymy in his ‘return to Freud’, linking metaphor with the mechanism of condensation and metonymy to the mechanism of displacement. In his essay ‘The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud’, Lacan cites metaphor and metonymy to be the two functions through which the illusion of a signified is produced. Meaning is constantly being displaced as ‘no single signifier is definitely attached to a single signified’.⁶ It is this main tenet of Lacanian thought which brings an added awareness into the way all language functions, and is invaluable in relation to the poems of Medbh McGuckian. This is a reciprocal interaction however, for not only does Lacanian theory provide new ways of considering McGuckian's poetry, but McGuckian's poetry equally provides new ways of thinking about some difficult Lacanian concepts.

Throughout McGuckian's poetry there is an implicit awareness of the Lacanian notion of the perpetual deferral of meaning, and lack of any fixed signifier or signified. ‘For a Young Matron’, for example, from McGuckian's collection On Ballycastle Beach, (published 1988), contains the lines:

Why not forget this word,
He asks. It's edgeless,
Echoless, it is stretched so
You cannot become its passenger.(7)

The word is described as ‘edgeless’ and ‘echoless’, evoking a sense of the formless and indistinct, and yet the lack of fixed boundaries works to resist closure and prevent an arrested meaning. The word itself remains significantly unspecified and is referred to repeatedly as ‘it’, thus with-holding any specific meaning. The alliteration of the ‘eh’ sound and the repetition of ‘less’ ironically provides an echoing effect, the ‘less’ working as both suffix to ‘edge’ and ‘echo’, and also as a compound word evoking a sense of loss or lack. The stanza ends with the declaration that the word ‘is stretched so / You cannot become its passenger.’ The positioning of ‘so’ creates a hinge in the statement that contains the implicit allusion that the word has become stretched and so cannot be owned. That one may be a ‘passenger’ to a word inverts the assumption that subjects own and control language. The subjects in McGuckian's poetry are not in control of language or meaning, for as advocates of Lacanian theory advance, ‘the subject no longer constitutes language or functions as its master, but conversely, is constituted as a subject by language’.⁸ There is a pervasive sense of loss and regret that runs throughout ‘For a Young Matron’, and the implicit collapse of love is paralleled by the collapse of language. What was once considered concrete and controllable is rendered transient and indefinite and both the signifier and signified have been exposed as precarious and unstable.

‘Echo-Poem’, found in the volume Marconi's Cottage (published in 1991), similarly undermines signification as fixed and stable. The title Marconi's Cottage alludes to the actual two-roomed cottage in Ballycastle on the north coast of Ireland where Marconi experimented with transmitting radio waves across the sea to Rathlin Island. McGuckian owns Marconi's Cottage and a preoccupation with various forms of communication is apparent throughout the volume. In ‘Echo-Poem’ death is personified as a female force, who is both feared and desired. The relationship between death and the persona of the poem is thus invested with sexual metaphoric undertones. It is the persona's father who is tied to death's stern, however, transforming the sexual tension to an implicit sense of loss and longing. Stanzas three and four generate an almost palpable sense of expectation.

Death is heavy-footed,
Bedfast; I feel
Sought by her,
I meet her
In the darkest part
Of staircases,
In regions where time
Can be accurately kept.
She will choose
Her body freely,
As a word chooses
Its meaning.
Her shoulder-twist
And cleavage feeds
Some foam-born
Germ in me.(9)

McGuckian likens the apparent freedom of death to choose her ‘body’ to the ability of words to choose their own meaning, thereby commenting on and drawing a parallel between the mutable and arbitrary condition of signification, and the unpredictability yet certainty of death. Paradoxically, however, once death has chosen her ‘body’ there is an inherent (biological) finality, which throughout McGuckian's oeuvre the play of signification endures beyond. Symbolic termination is postponed through its refusal to arrive at a specific signified and finalise the play of serial displacement.

Due to the lack of any fixed or determined meaning, reactions to Medbh McGuckian's poems are diverse and often extreme, ranging from the parsimonious comments of Patrick Williams who accuses her of ‘teasing solipsistic metaphors’ with ‘specious authority’,¹⁰ to the defensive Catherine Byron, who responds to Williams with the declaration that ‘Medbh McGuckian's poetry is “difficult”, but it does not have the hermetic difficulty of the poetry of many an introverted, self-referential coterie of the elect’.¹¹ Although exactly who Byron considers to be a member of ‘the elect’ remains unclear, her repudiation of ‘the expected naturalistic photographs of the “so what” or anecdotal school of poetry’, in favour of McGuckian's ‘new way[s] of seeing’ demonstrates her desire to applaud poetry that moves beyond the pellucid and mimetic, a desire antithetical to Williams' own. Notwithstanding such disputes what is generally accepted by both critics and readers alike, is the difficulty of reading McGuckian's poetry due to the lack of any stable referents or reliable and consistent narrator. McGuckian's employment of metaphor and metonymy is similarly complex, as she works at the level of indeterminacy, ambiguity and polysemy. Rather than providing the reader with additional help, metaphors and similes generally propel the poem even deeper into a web of linguistic complexity. Each sentence, clause, and even word within the poem thus needs to be considered separately, as well as a constituent of the whole, and McGuckian even states that ‘I like the title to be a little poem itself’.¹²

A Lacanian understanding of metonymy is not based on any ‘real contiguity between objects’, but rather the ‘contiguity on which it depends is purely linguistic’ (Ecrits, 99). In the incessant movement of signification from one term to another, Lacan also recognised the condition of desire, which is similarly based on a chain of substitution. Desire is metonymic, for it consists of the endless search for the (lost) object along the indefinite chain of unsatisfactory substitutions and metonymic displacements. In relation to the poetry of McGuckian, Thomas Docherty's essay ‘Postmodern McGuckian’ contains some apposite comments regarding McGuckian's use of seduction. He states that:

rather than subscribing to some desire to identify what is produced, McGuckian prefers to work at the level of seduction itself. This way she questions the modern belief in the availability of identity.

(‘Postmodern McGuckian’, 212)

The ‘force of seduction’ in McGuckian's poetry is diffused along the metonymic chain of signifiers. Her poems seduce the reader into believing an essential ‘truth’ will be revealed, and yet meaning is ‘constantly deferred: sometimes, by a careful twist’ and ‘placed out of reach after the reader thinks it has been grasped’.¹³ Furthermore, as the second half of Docherty's comment indicates, not only is there no unified or stable meaning, but there is also no unified or stable self.

The Lacanian subject is inherently split and alienated from him/herself, a condition that can never be amended. Throughout McGuckian's oeuvre there is no fixed or stable ‘I’, as personal pronouns merge into each other undermining any sense of a unified subject and furthermore a stable and authoritative narrator. In ‘The Rising Out’, for example, the ‘dream sister’, can be read as the persona's inner voice, the poem playing out tensions between different aspects of the same psyche. The poem begins:

My dream sister has gone into my blood
To kill the poet in me before Easter. Such
a tender visit, when I move my palaces,
The roots of my shadow almost split in two,
Like the heartbeat of my own child, a little
Blue crocus in the middle of a brook, or the hesitant
Beginning of a song I knew, a stone-song
Too small for me, awaiting a drier music.(14)

The ‘sister’ can be read as the surfacing of the subject's unconscious anxieties, displaced onto a mythical ‘other’. Throughout this first stanza conflict is juxtaposed with fragile images, such as the child's heartbeat, a ‘little blue crocus’ and the hesitant song. The dream sister is potentially destructive and yet provides the essential seed of creativity, thus creating the atmosphere of tension that permeates the poem. In stanza three the persona states how ‘In my mind, / I try and try to separate one Alice from another’ (Venus and the Rain, 36), the repetition of ‘try’ suggesting that such a feat is ultimately impossible. The self, for McGuckian is composed of many identities, and a completely ‘knowable’ self is unrealisable. McGuckian is not providing a composite scene and linear narrative, but rather, like a dream, elements are broken, fragmented, and ignorant of the ‘rules’ that regulate ordered verse. The inconsistency of voice adds to the overall ambiguity and indeterminacy. As the poem unfolds, therefore, any ‘revelation’ anticipated by the reader becomes an increasingly unlikely prospect. Interrelated with the ‘unknowable’ self, there is a notable refusal to ‘name’, both in relation to others, and also in relation to the ‘I’ of the poem who recognises a fundamental alienation from the ‘self’. The persona in the poem ‘The Invalid's Echo’ states how ‘my name … comes / from nowhere and is ownerless’ (Marconi's Cottage, 13), and in ‘Smoke’ the subject declares that ‘I am unable even / to contain myself” (The Flower Master, 11). It is not, however, such recurrent declarations of a fractured identity that is most disturbing in McGuckian's poetry, rather, what is unsettling and disturbing is the regular dissolution of identity. The persona of the poem is not only rendered unreliable but can merge into objects, and even experience synaesthetic dissolution. ‘Harem Trousers’, exemplifies a wish to discard the ‘I’ of a poem completely, and in ‘Four O'Clock, Summer Street’ the ‘I’ slowly diminishes, leaving only the ability to listen: ‘I would shine in the window of her blood like wine / Or perfume, or till nothing was left of me but listening’ (Ballycastle, 31). The world McGuckian evokes is heterogeneous and punctuated with contradictions, thus questioning the reader's reliance on conventional representations of ‘reality’.

As with the Lacanian understanding of metonymy, metaphor is not based on any real similarity between terms, but rather signifiers are united through a ‘third term’ which enables ‘the substitution of signifier for signifier’ (Ecrits, 164). Metaphor halts the ‘indefinite sliding of meaning’ and freezes the signifier, confining it to the unconscious where it is no longer subject to movement and modification through other signifiers. It provides a synchronic ‘point de capiton’ (Ecrits, 99), an anchoring point where the chain is punctuated to produce meaning, however temporary it may be. McGuckian's poetry is replete with different types of metaphor, which effectively fuse together seemingly disparate things. Her notable employment of ‘paralogical’ metaphors, increase the level of obscurity through connecting ideas and images that have no clear resemblance to each other. There is also an expansive use of synaesthetic metaphors which fuse together sights and sounds. The poem ‘Death of a Ceiling’ begins with the abstract stanza:

The sounds that shapes make in the air,
The shapes that sounds make, matter
Whenever a stone or pocket-knife
Is rocketed through water.

(Ballycastle, 26)

The sibilance and reversed repetition of ‘sounds’ and ‘shapes’ evokes a feeling or sensation rather than any clear meaning or narrative. There is, however, a regular rhythm within this first stanza providing an element of consistency beneath the inexplicable surface. McGuckian does not discard all sense of syntagmatic and paradigmatic stability, therefore, but provides tentative footholds from which the reader may navigate. The rhythm in conjunction with the sibilance creates a mimetic effect, the rhythm and hissing sound imitating the water it describes. The half-rhymes of ‘matter’ and ‘water’ are also significantly made by Wordsworth for whom it constituted a full rhyme in a Cumbrian accent. Any allusion to language and dialect by an Irish poet is inherently contentious and McGuckian scatters such subtle references to identity politics throughout her oeuvre. Thus, whilst absolute meaning itself is destabilised, there exists a residual and local territorialisation of meaning that prevents a complete dissolution and opacity.

Applying Lacanian theory to poetry is complex, and yet there are increasing attempts to do so.¹⁵ What can be discussed is how McGuckian's concerns are comparable with those associated with Lacan, concerns such as the acquisition of language, the configuration of subjectivity, and the interplay between the conscious and unconscious, guilt and anxiety, death and desire. McGuckian's poem ‘Isba Song’ in her collection Venus and the Rain (first published in 1984) discloses these concerns, and, furthermore, the tension that is frequently exposed in McGuckian's poetry between metaphor and metonymy. The poem begins:

Beyond the edge of the desk, the Victorian dark
Inhabits childhood, youth-seeking, death-seeking,
Bringing almost too much meaning to my life,
Who might have been content with one storey.

(Venus, 26)

The declaration that ‘Beyond the edge of the desk, the Victorian dark / inhabits childhood’, implies a realm of repression which governs our infantile memories and experiences. There is an initial feeling of unease, however, accompanying this metaphor as it is the ‘Victorian dark’ which ‘inhabits childhood’, situating the dark as the prominent focus, which, moreover, embodies the ‘youth-seeking’ and ‘death-seeking’ impulses which Lacan states defines human subjectivity. Any recognition of the tension between these drives, or the surfacing of repressed childhood memories threatens to bring ‘almost too much meaning’ to the subject's life, ‘Who might have been content with one storey.’ There is a play on words here between the double use of ‘storey’, as it refers to both the Russian one-storey dwelling, the isba, and also suggests a contentment with accepting only one ‘storey’ of the psyche, the surface, the conscious. The reference to the ‘turned-outwards windows of the isba’ is also significant here in relation to the persona's psyche as it suggests an openness to the ‘outside’, the external, rather than an engagement with a deeper psychic level. The ambiguous use of ‘storey’ provides an apposite example of the constant tension in McGuckian's poems between metonymy and metaphor.

Also within this poem, there is a moment of subjective fracturing as the persona recognises in her desire to be renamed ‘the sound of another woman's voice, / Which I believed was the sound of my own.’ It is the externalised ‘other’ who wishes to ‘divide her song’ and yet the ‘I’ of the poem ‘took nothing but the first syllable of her name’, thus accepting her ‘split’ condition alongside the implicit knowledge that a fully realised self consciousness will never be gained. McGuckian is also providing a multilingual pun on her own first name here, as the Irish name ‘Medbh’ contains the English word ‘me’. The personal and the political have merged as McGuckian plays with the use of English and Irish words, skillfully representing a troubled sense of identity. McGuckian has an ambivalent and volatile relationship with the English language as she feels constantly in battle with what she feels is an ‘imposed’ tongue.¹⁶ McGuckian is opposing the need to name in order to ‘fix’ meaning, cohere the world, and repress what may be incomprehensible.

The ‘effect’ of the subjects limited knowledge is likened in the poem to a ‘gentler terrain within a wilder one’, an image which appositely captures the configuration of subjectivity cloven between the conscious and the unconscious. The poem concludes as enigmatically as it began, with the assertion that:

… Otherwise I might have well
Ignored the ground that shone for me, that did enough
To make itself rebound from me, out of which I was made.

(Venus, 26)

The ambiguous use of ‘Otherwise’ here attempts to justify the choices taken throughout the poem, the contentment ‘with one storey’, and the acceptance of only ‘the first syllable’ of the woman's name, and yet ironically, the choices have only confirmed the subject's inability to ever know that out of which she was made.

As this paper has exemplified, McGuckian's poetry exhibits a concern with how language functions and signifiers interact, and the deliberate ‘play of signifiers’ contributes to the frustration which McGuckian's poetry ceaselessly engenders. McGuckian is demonstrating how ‘freed from their “normal” channels of reference, words can shed their natural and conventional associations’ (Poetics, 55), to (re)embody an indeterminate meaning. As a Lacanian reading has helped to elucidate, meaning slides ceaselessly through the lines as each signifier relates only to another signifier, denying the reader what is most desired, (and yet what Lacan would state is never present), a fixed and determined relationship between signifier and signified. Meaning in McGuckian's poetry, however, is not absent as despite the open play of signification there is an always disputable but nevertheless intractable relationship between the floating signifiers as they are structured within the edifice of the poem. McGuckian is inviting the reader to consider how meaning is always produced, in progress, and subject to revision, thus looping back on itself, unravelling and reforming, for as she states in ‘Pulsus Paradoxus’, ‘a word has only an aroma of meaning’.¹⁷

Notes

1. Richard Kidder, ‘Jakobson, Roman Osipovich’, in (ed) Irena R. Makaryk, Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 375.

2. Medbh McGuckian, ‘The Long Engagement’, in The Flower Master, (Ireland: The Gallery Press, 1993), 18-19. All subsequent references from this edition are cited parenthetically.

3. Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981), 45. All subsequent references from this text are cited parenthetically.

4. Thomas Docherty, ‘Postmodern McGuckian’, in Neil Corcoran ed., The Chosen Ground: Essays on Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland, (London: Seren Books, 1992), 200. All subsequent references from this text are cited parenthetically.

5. Richard Bradford, Roman Jakobson: Life, Language, Art, (London: Routledge, 1994), 18.

6. Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, (London: Routledge, 1990), 95. All subsequent references from this text are cited parenthetically.

7. Medbh McGuckian, ‘For a Young Matron’, in On Ballycastle Beach, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 41. All subsequent references taken from this edition are cited parenthetically.

8. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, (London: Tavistock Publications Ltd, 1977), 97. All subsequent references taken from this text are cited parenthetically.

9. Medbh McGuckian, ‘Echo Poem’, in Marconi's Cottage (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 1992), 67-68. All subsequent references taken from this edition are cited parenthetically.

10. Patrick Williams, ‘Spare That Tree!’, Honest Ulsterman, 86 (1989), 50-2.

11. Catherine Byron, ‘Such Declarations May be Routine Enough in the McGuckian Household: Response to Patrick Williams’, Honest Ulsterman, 87 (1989), 87.

12. Susan Sailer Shaw, ‘Interview with Medbh McGuckian’, Michigan Quarterly, 32:1 (1993), 126.

13. R. J. C. Watt, in Tracey Chavalier (ed), Contemporary Poets: Fifth Edition, (St James Press, 1991), 630.

14. McGuckian, ‘Rising Out’, in Venus and the Rain, (Ireland: The Gallery Press, 1994), 36. All subsequent references taken from this edition are cited parenthetically.

15. See Paul Bentley, The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Language, Illusion and Beyond, (Harlow: Longman, 1988).

16. See Kimberly S Bohman, ‘Surfacing: An Interview with Medbh McGuckian’, Irish Review, 16 (1994), and Laura O'Connor (foreword and afterword), ‘Comhrá: Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’, Southern Review, 31:3 (1995).

17. Medbh McGuckian, ‘Pulsus Paradoxus’, in Shelmalier, (Ireland: The Gallery Press, 1998), 40.