SOURCE: Haberstroh, Patricia Boyle. “Medbh McGuckian.” In Women Creating Women, edited by Patricia Boyle Haberstroh, pp. 123-58. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Haberstroh evaluates the language and style of McGuckian's poems in light of specific conflicts and ambivalences encountered by the contemporary Irish woman poet.]

Medbh McGuckian's poetry has elicited a great deal of interest since the publication of her first major volume. The Flower Master, in 1982.¹ Born in Northern Ireland, she was the first woman to be recognized among the “Northern Voices,” the Ulster poets who came to prominence in the 1970s. Chosen as first woman poet-in-residence at Queens University in Belfast, McGuckian has been described both as “the most white-hot Irish poet since Yeats” (1990, 210) and as a writer whose work “cheerfully and explicitly ignores the risk of choking on its own exclusivity” (1992, 20). By 1991, McGuckian had published three other volumes: Venus and the Rain (1984), On Ballycastle Beach (1988), and Marconi's Cottage (1991). In another volume, Two Women, Two Shores (1989), McGuckian's poems are collected with those of the Irish-American poet Nuala Archer.²

From the beginning McGuckian's work sparked a variety of critical responses.³ Reviewers praised the striking quality of her imagery, generally agreeing that her poems had something to do with “womanliness.” Struck by the associative nature of her images, readers also found her poetry discursive, oblique, and, in some cases, incomprehensible. McGuckian had given them ample fuel for this fire with her very dense and complicated style.

In a 1982 review in Encounter, Alan Jenkins summed up some of the problems he saw in The Flower Master: “discontinuities of sense; sudden changes of grammatical subject and tense, shifts in personal pronoun and the consequent indeterminacy of the speaking voice; startling juxtapositions and ellipses; the subverting of expectations set up by the apparent direction of a sentence; qualifying or elaborating phrases proliferating endlessly” (57). Jenkins expressed an ambivalence toward McGuckian's work echoed by other readers; calling some of her poems “stunning,” he also accused her of “rhetorical posturing.” In a fall 1992 review of Marconi's Cottage in the Irish Literary Supplement, Denis Flannery demonstrates a similar impatience with McGuckian's work when he argues that “the language and the self are omnivorous in their relation to the world around them” and that the poetry “manages to be self-obsessed while refusing to be intimate” (21).

Concentrating almost exclusively on style, Jenkins, as well as some other readers, failed to recognize the connections between idea and style in McGuckian's poetry. This is not to say that every one of McGuckian's poems works, nor is it to downplay the difficulty that confronts the reader. But if we are to understand the “idiosyncrasies” of a poet labeled both “original” and “brilliant” by readers who also admit to sometimes being baffled by her poems, we might start with the assumption that she is writing as a woman about women's experience. Every McGuckian poem embodies, directly or indirectly, the conflicts and ambivalences of a woman poet trying to understand the multiple facets of her life, and McGuckian's language and style must be examined in light of this.

Reading McGuckian's poetry, it is helpful to draw on feminist literary theory and descriptions of “womanwriting” and écriture feminine. McGuckian herself encouraged such a reading when she suggested, in an interview with Kathleen McCracken in the Irish Literary Supplement, that her poetry has “its own logic which may be opposite of men's”; that, because language has been devitalized, “poetry must dismantle the letters” (McGuckian 1990, 20). The charge of solipsism leveled against McGuckian may arise from our failure to consider that her experiments move beyond conventional definitions of poetic voice, language, and self.

Hélène Cixous's description of “invention” sheds some light on McGuckian's approach: “there is no invention possible, whether it be philosophical or poetic, without there being in the inventing subject an abundance of the other, of variety: separate-people, thought-people, whole populations issuing from the unconscious, and in each suddenly animated desert the springing up of selves one didn't know” (1989, 103). Though Cixous maintains that female writing cannot be “theorized, enclosed, coded” (109), McGuckian presents an interesting illustration of the way in which poetry may reveal the “invention” Cixous describes. Multiple layers of meaning and numerous associations suggest both a deconstructed language and a deconstructed self.

If Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin struggled to create an “I” in her poetry, McGuckian suffers from the opposite problem: at times there are so many Is and yous addressed that we have trouble knowing who is who. Likewise, McGuckian's hes and shes seem to defy our attempts to keep the genders separate and in place. We should note, however, that these are all personal pronouns, and the person is what McGuckian is trying to redefine. Her pronouns often fracture selfhood into many components: her personae see in themselves both the conventional feminine and masculine, and they have multiple and variable personalities. Refusing to be limited by a fixed “I,” McGuckian's poetry demands that we go with her into new territory, even if, as Kate Newmann suggests, “just as you are about to read the compass the needle disappears” (1992, 173).

In describing the characteristics of écriture feminine, Luce Irigaray, like Cixous and Julia Kristeva, connects language with sexuality. Describing what she defines as “womanspeak,” Irigaray, a psychoanalyst drawing on the work of Derrida and Lacan, sees woman's language as decentered, irrational, and nonlinear, unlike the logocentric, hierarchical expression of patriarchy. In “When Our Two Lips Speak Together,” Irigaray describes woman as remaining “in flux, never congealing or solidifying” (1985, 215), and argues that women must invent a language that expresses their difference: “Stretching out, never ceasing to unfold ourselves, we have so many different voices to invent in order to express all of us everywhere, even in our gaps, that all the time there is will not be enough” (213).

McGuckian's imagery reflects such different voices, as well as the “cracks,” “faults,” and “flux” Irigaray describes. Multiple figures continually appear and disappear in McGuckian's poems. Sisters, female and male lovers, husbands and wives, parents and children come together and separate, are born and die, in the landscape of McGuckian's world. Speakers move in and out of shadow and mist, confront the day and hide in the night. Ghosts, mirrors and looking glasses, dream sisters, and phantom lovers materialize and dissolve. Weather, the elements, planets, houses, flowers, and ships take on gender to embody McGuckian's themes. One speaker's assertion in “Prie-Dieu” (1984, 29), that “This oblique trance is my natural / Way of speaking” and another's claim in “Aviary” (1984, 21) that “my longer and longer sentences / Prove me wholly female” signal that McGuckian's style may indeed be a challenge to logocentric thinking and conventional grammar and syntax.

Difficulty arises from the multiple meanings emanating from McGuckian's words and images, especially her personal pronouns. While the “I” and the “you” in a poem like “From the Dressing-Room” (1984, 14) are described as a woman and a man, numerous Is and yous materialize to complicate matters. Sometimes the speaker apologizes for her “surrenders” to a “you” she addresses, as in “The Sofa” (1982, 19):

                                        … If you were friend enough
To believe me, I was about to start writing
At any moment; my mind was savagely made up,
Like a serious sofa moved
Under a north window. My heart, alas,
Is not the calmest of places.

Temptations, referred to as “disasters,” “surrenders,” “loss” (and evoking suggestions of seduction by a lover) undercut her commitment to start writing. In the final lines, the speaker, focusing on the personal pronoun “I,” imagines “herself” as a missing actor: “A curtain rising wonders where I am, / My books sleep, pretending to forget me.” Ironically, McGuckian has written a poem about not writing a poem, and her speaker embodies both the “you” and the “me” (displacing the missing “I”), with the final stage metaphor reinforcing the different roles she plays.

As Catherine Byron says, McGuckian's “‘I’ is never to be taken for granted … it is always to be understood afresh in each poem, as is her ‘you’” (1988, 16).⁴ Multiple meanings emanate from McGuckian's pronouns; “I” and “you,” “he” or “she” can be read on many levels. Complicated experimentation with personal pronouns, what Jenkins calls the “indeterminacy of the speaking voice,” is indeed difficult to follow. However, when we recognize how McGuckian's pronouns and images express the complex interaction among her multiple figures (those “different voices” Irigaray describes), we marvel at both the originality and success of her achievement.

In an essay on “Postmodern McGuckian,” Thomas Docherty associates McGuckian not only with feminist poetics, but also with postmodern literary techniques:⁵ “Often it is difficult to locate any single position from which the poem can be spoken. In philosophical terms, we have a kind of a ‘blank phenomenology’: the relation between the speaking Subject or ‘I’ and the Object of its intention is mobile or fluid. It reads as if the space afforded the ‘I’ is vacant: instead of a stable ‘persona,’ all we have is a potential of personality, a voice which cannot yet be identified” (1992, 192). Suggesting the effects of this “blank phenomenology,” Docherty maintains that McGuckian “is always—temporally and temperamentally—at odds with herself: the poems chart a dislocation in their speaker, who always occupies some different temporal moment from the moment actually being described in the poem” (201-202).

McGuckian's numerous speakers appear in many guises, as writers, lovers, wives, mothers, and the mediation among and between them is at the heart of most of her poems. We see, for example, the housewife and mother in “Power-Cut” (1982, 47) showing how her multiple lives overtake one another as day dissolves into night in her kitchen:

My dishes on the draining-board
Lie at an even keel, the baby lowered
Into his lobster-pot pen; my sponge
Disintegrates in water like a bird's nest,
A permanent wave gone west.
These plotted holes of days my keep-net shades,
Soluble as refuse in canals; the old flame
Of the candle sweats in the night, its hump
A dowager's with bones running thin:
The door-butler lets the strangers in.

Reading McGuckian, we become familiar with opening and closing doors, one scene dissolving as another comes into focus. McGuckian's images here detail aspects of a woman's life: babies, dishes, nests, the permanent wave. For this mother, however, the disappearance of day life has ominous overtones. The baby in his “lobster-pot pen” suggests the sacrifice of one part of her life for another; the disintegrating sponge and the “holes of days” as “Soluble as refuse in canals” reinforce how one life dissolves into another.

The images in this poem depict different states in which this unstable persona exists: the domestic day world of sink, sponge, and baby, and the imaginative night world of the poet, identified with the flame of the sweating candle. Intruding strangers recur in McGuckian's poetry, and passages from night to day, day to night, season to season, waking to sleep describe the movement from one state to another.

In McGuckian's poems mothers are juxtaposed with lovers, and love-making has many dimensions: the union between lovers can be an image for the intercourse between man and woman or between a speaking “I” and an “other” voice within the self. In “To the Nightingale” (1984, 13), McGuckian writes:

I remember our first night in this grey
And paunchy house; you were still slightly
In love with me, and dreamt of having
A grown son, your body in the semi-gloom
Turning my dead layers into something
Resembling a rhyme. That smart and
Cheerful rain almost beat the hearing
Out of me, and yet I heard my name
Pronounced in a whisper as a June day
Will force itself into every room.

Our first reading of these lines suggests a woman describing love-making and her lover's wish for a son. But the title, “To the Nightingale,” refers us to Keats, and the body and voice helping to create “something / Resembling a rhyme” take on another meaning as McGuckian compares the intercourse between poet and muse to that between man and woman. The “you” addressed is not another person, but another voice within the speaker, one struggling to be heard; the consummation of “you” and “I” will create the child/poem. When we understand this, the initial confusion over pronouns is cleared up and we can see McGuckian revising Keats: “To the nightingale it made no difference / Of course, that you tossed about an hour, / Two hours, till what was left of your future / Began.” Embedded in these lines also is another kind of intercourse, between poet and poet, as McGuckian's female speaker consorts with the male Romantic poet who inspired the poem.⁶

In her early poems there is less experimentation with pronouns, but McGuckian's images have a logic of their own. One of the most startling aspects of her first volume, The Flower Master, is its focus on sexuality and the ways in which gender lines are sometimes blurred. Like Eavan Boland in In Her Own Image, McGuckian continually stresses the sexual nature of the subjects and speakers of these poems, and her flower images suggest both sex and gender roles. “Womanliness” is highlighted in McGuckian's “Tulips” (1982, 10); the flowers, the poem tells us, close up at night, declaring their independence from sun and rain:

                                        such present-mindedness
To double-lock in tiers as whistle-tight,
Or catch up on sleep with cantilevered
Palms cupping elbows. It's their independence
Tempts them to this grocery of soul.

In this poem, as well as in many others, McGuckian gives the sun and the rain male qualities. The speaker sees the “lovelessness” of the light that opens the tulips as a “deeper sort / Of illness than the womanliness / Of tulips,” for the controlling sun (a flower master) undermines their independence. Like their human female counterparts, and like fictional governesses, tulips can also be “carried away.”

The flowers in another poem, “Gentians” (1982, 25), can be contrasted to the tulips in one respect:

                                                            No insects
Visit them, nor do their ovaries swell,
Yet every night in Tibet their seeds
Are membraned by the snow, their roots
Are bathed by the passage of melt-water;
They tease like sullen spinsters
The dewfall of summer limes.

The gentians' spinsterly qualities fascinate the speaker; their “independence” links them to the tulips. Clearly suggesting female sexual organs (“something precious / Deep inside, that beard of camel-hair in the throat”), the androgynous gentians also exhibit male characteristics: “their watery husbands' knots.” Not subject to the mastery of the day sun, as are the tulips, the gentians reproduce at night, without swollen ovaries. We do not have too far to go with a theory of correspondences to see the links McGuckian, makes between the natural and the human worlds. The relationships between women and men, female and male lovers, reproduction and motherhood are all embodied in these images. Questions of mastery, of dependence and independence, and of gender constructions, continually arise.⁷

Sometimes, as in “The Swing” (1982, 31), McGuckian turns to mythological images to suggest the potential consequences of sexual activity:

Each evening the Egyptian goddess
Swallowed the sun, her innocent
Collective pleasure, never minding his violent temper,
His copious emissions, how he sprinkled
The lawn of space till it became
A deadly freckled junkyard.

These lines describe the stars in the night sky as emissions of the sun, but in the sexual intercourse they suggest there is another meaning. Freckles evoke the image of children, and “deadly” and “junkyard” both hint at the latent consequences of the sun's “copious emissions” and the goddess's “innocent” pleasures.

The image of an “invisible child” at the end of the poem, recalling the “deadly freckled junkyard” of the earlier lines, creates a deliberate ambiguity. The strange weather, the drought, and the Egyptian goddess in the opening lines identify a speaker very much concerned with the relationship between lovemaking and childbearing, with the consequences of her actions and decisions. The title image of the swing, suggesting movement back and forth, reinforces the ambivalence we hear in the speaker's voice and illustrates McGuckian's repeated use of images of suspension between states of mind or action.

This potentially precarious side of lovemaking and childbearing, however, is offset by a more affirmative one, described by other speakers in The Flower Master. The mother-to-be in “The Sunbench” (1982, 32), for example, meditates on the value of motherhood. The speaker explains to the child in her womb what she has given:

This is not the hardness of a single night,
A rib that I could clearly do without. It is
The room where you have eaten daily,
Shaking free like a hosting tree, the garden
Shaking off the night's weak appetite,
The sunbench brown and draining into fallow.

The male's part in this creation, whether the phallic “hardness of a single night” or the expendable rib Adam supposedly gave Eve in another garden, is slighted here in favor of the longer and more difficult female work of sheltering the child in a “room” in the mother's body/house. As the hosting tree, this speaker, another flower master, recognizes that her “control” as host is temporary.

The role of gardener (or flower master) has not traditionally been assigned to women, as a poem like “The Heiress” (1982, 50) reveals. Commenting on the “husbandry” that the fields before her reveal, the speaker acknowledges the “delicate adam work.” Explaining that she has recently delivered a son, she stresses the value of Eve work, though she notes that “the birth / Of an heiress means the gobbling of land.” Challenging her role, this heiress, who has been told to stay out of the fields, nevertheless walks along the beach, dropping acorns among the shrubbery.

McGuckian has said that she had Mary Queen of Scots in mind when she wrote this poem, which lends a historical dimension to the volume's focus on mastery and control of the land and to questionable issues of heirs, ownership, and gender in English and Northern Irish history. At the same time, the poem suggests the ways in which women have been denied not only the right to own property but also comparable acknowledgment for their work as wives and mothers. The adjective “unruly” can be applied both to Mary Queen of Scots, who also “lighter of a son” found herself involved in the “gobbling of land,”⁸ and to all women who try to move beyond and reimagine the domestic life and subordinate roles defined for them.

Much of the conflict expressed by the speakers in The Flower Master grows from their movement into spheres other than lover and mother. The most frequent of these involves the woman as artist. Over and over again, McGuckian pictures women as makers and subjects of works of art. “Some women save their sanity with needles. / I complicate my life with studies / Of my favourite rabbit's head,” announces the speaker in “Mr McGregor's Garden” (1982, 14). Ticking off the creatures in her garden, she also describes the “fungi,” the “dry-rot,” the “slimy veil” under some flowers. Most curious is her hedgehog who, moving out of Beatrix Potter's world, turns into a male version of a harried housewife: “very cross if interrupted, / And returns with a hundred respirations / To the minute, weak and nervous when he wakens, / Busy with his laundry.” Suggesting that her studies might reveal much about herself (and also about Beatrix Potter), this speaker is one of many artists and poets in The Flower Master for whom art is both an escape from their more mundane lives and a form of self-expression.

“The Seed-Picture” (1982, 23) is a good example of such a poem and a fine illustration of the ways in which McGuckian fuses the different image patterns in The Flower Master. The female artist here “masters” flowers in the portrait she creates from seeds. The poem begins with the barest outlines of a narrative:

This is my portrait of Joanna—since the split
The children come to me like a dumb-waiter,
And I wonder where to put them, beautiful seeds
With no immediate application. …

Working from the image of children as seeds that need nurturing, the speaker tries to create a seed picture of Joanna. Maintaining that seeds have their own “vocabulary,” sometimes expressing more than one intends, the speaker tells us that she can only “guide” them. Still she questions what she is doing:

Was it such self-indulgence to enclose her
In the border of a grandmother's sampler,
Bonding all the seeds in one continuous skin,
The sky resolved to a cloud the length of a man?
To use tan linseed for the trees, spiky
Sunflower for leaves, bright lentils
For the window, patna stars
For the floral blouse? Her hair
Is made of hook-shaped marigold, gold
Of pleasure for her lips, like raspberry grain.
The eyelids oatmeal, the irises
Of Dutch blue maw, black rape
For the pupils, millet
For the vicious beige circles underneath.
The single pearl barley
That sleeps around her dullness
Till it catches light, makes women
Feel their age, and sigh for liberation.

In this portrait, words and images allude to a potential narrative: the “Dead flower heads where insects shack” might be a metaphor for a home; the artist's attempt to attach the seeds “by the spine to a perfect bedding” an ironic commentary on the marriage bed after the “split.” Adjectives and nouns reverberate with multiple meaning: the more negative “tear-drop apple,” “pocked peach,” “wrinkled pepper-corns,” “black rape,” and “vicious” circles underneath Joanna's eyes counterpoint the more positive “gold / Of pleasure for her lips” and “irises / Of Dutch blue maw.” The image of the “sky resolved to a cloud the length of a man” suggests that we read the poem as a portrait of a woman's life with husband and children.

On another level, however, the poem deals with the speaker's artistic work, and McGuckian's use of the term “vocabulary” encourages us to broaden the definition of artist to include writers, who “guide” words. Likewise, McGuckian's tendency to fragment the poetic voice leads us to read the images and pronouns as different sides of one woman. With her question “Was it self-indulgence … ?” McGuckian returns to her theme of the conflicts women writers and artists confront, and it is not hard to imagine the two women here as wife/mother and artist/poet, with the artist/poet worried about abandoning her domestic and maternal duties. The poem opens with the maker of the seed picture anxious about Joanna's children (“I wonder where to put them”) and closes with an image of women who, recognizing the “dullness” of Joanna's life, “sigh for liberation.” Making a seed picture, “Bonding all the seeds in one continuous skin,” like creating a child, can bring “light” to a woman's life, but it can also lead to stress as she juggles the roles of mother and artist.

Highlighting the value of women artists whose subject is women, whether in folk-art seed pictures or “portrait” poems, “The Seed-Picture” is one of McGuckian's finest poems. The speaker explains that the seed work has opened “new spectrums of activity,” but it seems also to have created problems. Her question about whether such work is self-indulgent gets directly to the heart of the matter: over and over again, women in The Flower Master ask how they can balance the traditional life of a woman, with all of its attendant expectations, with the artist's career.

On the other hand, as Susan Porter demonstrates, the mother and the poet in. “The Seed-Picture” share similar experiences:

In all senses of seed, then, and particularly as it connotes children, the work involved is partly guiding and partly knowing that what one guides is ultimately beyond any “author's” control and contains within it from the beginning elements that were not subject to her desires or intentions. The woman who is also a poet is prepared by her experience in the female world of “children,” “home,” “jumbled garages,” “seed-work” for the realization that words and arrangements of words, too, “capture / More than we can plan” and carry within them the seeds of many and varied meanings.⁹

(1989, 97)

As Georgia O'Keeffe's The White Trumpet Flower, on the cover of some editions of The Flower Master, suggests correlations between the sexual connotations in O'Keeffe's paintings and McGuckian's poems, the illustration on the cover of Venus and the Rain, Jan Toorop's 1892 work The Younger Generation, leads us into McGuckian's second volume. Noted for his symbolism, the Dutch painter experimented with surrealism in the 1890s. Some of his scenes of Dutch fishing villages, The Younger Generation among them, include nursing mothers and melancholy women.

In the illustration on the cover of Venus and the Rain (1984), a young woman stands in a doorway opening into a garden, where mysterious figures appear in shadowy foliage. Creating a multiple perspective, Toorop places the hinges on what seems to be the wrong side of the door, so that we are not sure whether it is opening in or out: the door appears to open on one side as it closes on the other. The young woman's face is indistinct; we cannot see what lies behind the door at which she is standing; and the elaborate facade appears to be both attached, and at a right angle, to the door. In the disconcerting garden outside the door, railroad tracks and a warning light frame a scene in which a tree spirit hovers above a child sitting in a chair. Toorop experiments here with the modernist's technique of simultaneity: planes and worlds interpenetrate as he blends detailed linear, representational images with the more ambiguous, fantastic, and shadowy curves of the garden. Foreground and background are not clearly delineated, and the demarcation between house and garden, represented by the door, is deliberately blurred.

This illustration gives us several visual clues to the landscape McGuckian creates in Venus and the Rain. As we have seen in The Flower Master, her women move from one realm to another in an often frustrating attempt to live several different kinds of lives, and houses, doors, and rooms are prominent images. Like the almost faceless woman standing in the doorway in Toorop's picture, McGuckian's speakers are often suspended between worlds; at times, they speak of disappearing or “rising out.” While there is a danger in reading too much into the relationship between the cover illustration and the poems, much of McGuckian's imagery encourages us to do so. Houses, doors, gardens, trains, and infants show up frequently in these poems.

Outside the door the blending of the ordinary with the fantastic expresses the fusion of the mundane and the mysterious we often see in the lives of McGuckian's personae. The tracks, like McGuckian's staircases, suggest the journey from one of these worlds to the other, and the warning lights hint of the problems involved in such transformations. Toorop's work reinforces a point McGuckian demonstrates: that images, whether in poetry or the visual arts, can illustrate the multidimensional lives women lead, so that what first appear to be strange associations among these images are not necessarily so. Toorop's modernist technique, in which he connects images to one another in an associative, nonrepresentational way, is similar to McGuckian's; both fuse seemingly unrelated images into an artistic and symbolic whole.

In Venus and the Rain rooms appear and disappear, doors open and close, and windows reflect both in and out. McGuckian's subjects move from one part of the house to another, locking and unlocking doors as they go. Houses expand: some are tethered; others cannot be anchored. And McGuckian's gardens, like Toorop's, can be frightening places: they are “ragged” in one poem, “desolate” in another, and in a third, emblems of change and death where “once you have seen a crocus in the act / Of giving way to the night, your life / No longer lives you.”

In talking about Venus and the Rain, McGuckian has said that when she was writing these poems she was at home “going crazy,” and “stuck in the house with babies.”¹⁰ Given these circumstances, we can understand why images of houses appear so often. But McGuckian's images have additional meanings, and the confinement and expansion of houses, the shifting of boundaries within them, quite often reflect the woman writer's struggle with words. Such is the case in “Isba Song” (1984, 23), in which the speaker sits at a desk:

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,
And the turned-outwards windows of the isba.

An isba, a note to the poem explains, is a Russian one-story dwelling, and the writer here, with “two hands free,” meditates on what lies beyond the edges of the desk, beyond the “turned-outwards” windows. She tells us she has heard in the darkness the voice of another woman who had been eager “to divide her song.” We soon realize that “storey” refers not only to the levels of a dwelling but also to the many “stories” a poem might express, and that the windows, like Toorop's door, turn both inwards and outwards.

The two subjects here, an “I” and a “her,” are separate but fused: one lives beyond the perimeters of the desk, the other sits as the locus of everything beyond the desk, but there is interaction and sharing between them, a shifting of boundaries, as it were.¹¹ A part of this “other” voice (“the first syllable of her name”) survives in the woman at the desk, who sees the effect of borrowing as “a gentler terrain within a wilder one,” or “as wood might learn to understand / The borrowings of water, or pottery capitulate / Its dry colours.”

The wild, the dark, or the fluid coming into form evokes images of the artist creating (the wood to be sculpted, the wet pot before it is dried) and connect directly to the speaker whose desk is the locus of the darkness that surrounds her. In the final lines she describes the value of listening to this other voice, drawing on the multiple connotations of “I” and “me,” as McGuckian often does: “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.”

Positioned between the darkness beyond the desk and the light that shone for her, the woman at the desk is another version of McGuckian's metamorphosing persona.¹² The woman in the darkness, willing to “divide her song,” is essentially a maternal figure and the final image is one of birth. Phrases like “death-seeking” and “mournful locus” and “almost too much meaning to my life” suggest that there is also a darkness of mood, a gloominess that must be challenged for the poetic voice to emerge. These phrases can also be connected to the process of writing, illustrating that “invention” of different voices to “speak all of us” that Luce Irigaray describes as “womanwriting.”

Venus, the volume's presiding deity, has both mythological and planetary significance: McGuckian alludes to the goddess of love who rose from the sea, but Venus is also the second planet from the sun, shrouded by thick clouds and distinguished by a unique backwards rotation.

In the opening poem, “Venus and the Sun” (1984, 9), McGuckian turns to astronomy for her imagery. “I am the sun's toy—,” the planet complains, yet it also claims to have its own influence: “because I go against / The grain I feel the brush of my authority.” Orbiting the sun, Venus follows a fixed path within the solar system; nevertheless, because it rotates backwards, it has its own “authority.” The planet's role in the interplay of gravitational forces is described in the opening lines:

The scented flames of the sun throw me,
Telling me how to move—I tell them
How to bend the light of shifting stars:
I order their curved wash so the moon
Will not escape, so rocks and seas
Will stretch their elbows under her.

These images remind us of the power of the sun in The Flower Master, especially in the way it undercuts the independence of the tulips. Frustrated by the restrictions of orbiting within a solar system, Venus contrasts its role to that of the stars, who are “still at large” and can fly apart from one another. Venus describes the sun as a “traplight” and imagines the sun and moon as opposites, positing a murky middle ground where its own influence lies.

From one perspective McGuckian's astronomy can be read as modeling a woman's struggle to balance dependence and independence, to be connected to others but maintain a course of her own. Her “direction,” or freedom of movement, is often controlled by the roles she plays, like orbiting a man, reflecting the light of the “brighter” star. Yet this Venus stresses her own unique identity, the force of her backwards rotation and its influence upon the other planets in the system. The conflict between these roles provides the source for much of the imagery and many of the themes in Venus and the Rain.

Venus in her mythological role as goddess of love inhabits many of these poems, highlighting as they do the sexual lives of their speakers. The relationship between sexuality and art is stressed in poems like “The Sitting” (1984, 15):

My half-sister comes to me to be painted:
She is posing furtively, like a letter being
Pushed under a door, making a tunnel with her
Hands over her dull-rose dress. Yet her coppery
Head is as bright as a net of lemons, I am
Painting it hair by hair as if she had not
Disowned it, or forsaken those unsparkling
Eyes as blue may be sifted from the surface
Of a cloud; and she questions my brisk
Brushwork, the note of positive red
In the kissed mouth I have given her,

Familiar with McGuckian's imagery, we can read the half-sister as one of the speaker's selves, what the poem calls “something half-opened.” In Venus and the Rain, openings and apertures are associated continually with Venus: on one level, they allude to Venus emerging from the sea; on another, they suggest female sexual organs; on a third, they express the artist's ability to open up hidden parts of herself. Pictured here as “a letter being / Pushed under a door,” the “half-sister” sits reluctantly, prudishly, with her hands forming a tunnel over her “dull-rose dress.” She is more comfortable with “sea-studies” (the unseen, unformed, non-sexual Venus) than with the colorful and sensual image (“coppery,” “blue,” “red”) the painter creates. This poem may delineate the difficulties of a woman painting herself, analogous to a woman poet writing about herself.

Venus and the Rain is packed with “doubles”: two sisters inhabiting one house, sister planets, ghosts, mirrors. Alice and Alice in the Looking Glass. The narratives of these poems interweave the complex situations of speakers with multiple lives: a woman who longs for union with her husband but demands a life of her own; a mother who describes both the joys and the burdens of bearing and raising children; a poet who consummates her relationship with her muse. These figures sometimes have both traditional male and traditional female qualities, for McGuckian's images often challenge conventional gender distinctions in search of a middle ground.

Images of intercourse, conception, birth and rebirth multiply in this volume; generation and regeneration occur in the speakers' sexual, maternal, and poetic lives. Significantly, McGuckian links poems about pregnancy with those about writing poems—the difficult process of creation expressing different versions of similar experiences. McGuckian's personae take us through stages of fertility—from intercourse, with lover or with muse, through the difficulties of carrying to term (both baby and poem), to the release that birth represents.

If we listen carefully to the numerous women's voices, we discover that fertility has advantages and disadvantages; it is both pleasurable and burdensome, attractive and dangerous. “The inhabitants of Venus / Are constantly in love, and always writing verses—,” the speaker in “A Day with Her” (1984, 48) tells us, and therein lies their problem. Like the planet that orbits backwards within the gravitational boundaries of the solar system, they seek both union and separation. The movement from one state to another is imagined in “The Rising Out” (1984, 35) as both a death and a birth:

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, …

Children in this volume are a source of both pleasure and anxiety for the woman writer. The speaker in “Sabbath Park” (1984, 54-55) describes her guilt, portraying herself as both mother and temperamental child:

                                                                                                    Broody
As a seven-month's child, I upset
The obsolete drawing-room that still seems
Affronted by people having just gone,
By astonishing Louisa with my sonnets,
Almost a hostage in the dream
Of her mother's hands

The domestic world of children, houses, and furniture here provides, as it does for most of McGuckian's work, the background for a poem about writing poems, and the mother's gift of her sonnets to her daughter—an ironic sharing with a child who is hostage to her mother's dream—expresses clearly the conflict and ambivalence of many of McGuckian's speakers.

But other speakers describe the advantages of motherhood, as in the beautiful poem “Confinement” (1984, 42), in which a mother and a child are alone in “a half-unpeopled / household”:

Child in the center of the dark parquet,
Sleepy, glassed-in child, my fair copy,
While you were sailing your boat in the bay,
I saw you pass along the terrace twice,
Flying in the same direction as the epidemic
Of leaves in the hall. Our half-unpeopled
Household, convalescent from the summer's leap,
That indiscreetly drew the damp from walls,
And coaxed our neighbour, the forest, into this
Sorority, how could I share with you, unpruned
And woebegone? A swan bearing your shape
Re-entered the river imagery of my arms.

In this short poem McGuckian brings together many of the ideas and images of the other poems in Venus and the Rain. Developing the imagery of boundaries, which recurs throughout the volume, this poem portrays a mother confined to the house with her “fair copy,” who is positioned in the center of a dark floor. If we associate the mother here with the female grayness so prominent in the rest of the volume, the child is a point of light to which her eyes are drawn. This light-shadow motif connects “Confinement” to the sun-Venus imagery in other poems, the image of confinement echoing, for example, the “traplight” of the sun in “Venus and the Sun.”

The child's circular “Flying” around the terrace reminds us, likewise, of the planetary images in “Venus and the Sun” and other poems. McGuckian illustrates the interdependence of mother and child while demonstrating their individuality: the child's world is glassed in, separating mother from child; but in flying around the terrace, the child also orbits its mother. The mother's question “how could I share with you?” makes this “confinement” ironic by revealing her love for her child, the “unpruned” and “woebegone” offspring transformed into the beautiful swan. The final image of the swan reentering the river, the child moving into the mother's arms, is a beautiful expression of the opening up of self, as mother embraces child in a simple act of love, counterpointing the confinement suggested by the title. The swan, an animal sacred to Venus, also alludes to the goddess of love.

If we look back to the earlier poem, “Isba Song,” we can read “Confinement” in still another way and see the child and mother as a variation of the interacting women. Like the one woman who borrows from another willing to “divide her song” in the earlier poem, the mother and child in “Confinement” are united at the end. The repetition of the central image in both poems not only links the mother with the writer but also suggests the way in which numerous components of a woman's life flow into one another. The river imagery of the mother's arms in “Confinement” echoes the “two hands free” of the writer in “Isba Song”; the conversion from woebegone child to swan expresses the transformation of personal experience into poem, the “glassed-in child, my fair copy” described in the opening lines. As I suggested earlier, every McGuckian poem directly or indirectly deals with multiple roles women play.

McGuckian's 1988 volume On Ballycastle Beach covers similar ground but also signals a new direction for the poet. Recurring images of houses, alter egos, colors, and weather accrue new meanings as McGuckian continues the self-explorations begun in her earlier poems. But the title alerts us that we are moving into a more specific regional landscape, Ballycastle being the birthplace of both McGuckian and her father,¹³ and into the murky territory of the “Northern” question. While this is not immediately clear from an initial reading of the poems, On Ballycastle Beach merges the personal with the political to embody a woman poet's commentary on the problems in her homeland. Because the volume is so dense with images and so packed with ideas, McGuckian's political message becomes part of a larger framework constructed from a very broad definition of “home.” Issues of time, territory, gender, language, and art emerge from images of homes, dreams, rivers and fountains, children, mothers, ships, and colors. Repeated readings yield new connections as McGuckian continually breaks down and redefines boundaries.

Again, the cover illustration on some editions, a Postimpressionistic Jack B. Yeats painting of a person standing on a beach dwarfed by a merging sea and sky, is closely related to poems McGuckian calls her “seascapes.” In the painting the lines between sea and sky, and between sea and land, are not clearly delineated, and Yeats blends colors into one another as numerous shades of blue, enhanced with white, black, yellow, red, and other colors, create the image we see. The barest outlines of a human shape define a person standing on the shore, with feet in the water. The more we look at this illustration, the more the boundaries separating the natural elements from one another, and the human figure from nature, tend to disappear.¹⁴

This illustration relates to the poems in many ways. On the most obvious level, it alludes to personal territory and to Ballycastle as a birthplace from which the poet moves away but to which she is still anchored. It also represents a place in Northern Ireland, shores to which English ships sailed hundreds of years ago, drawing new boundaries not only between England and Ulster but also between Northern Ireland and the Republic. As what one poem calls “a child of the North,” McGuckian sees the effects of such boundaries, and the poems deal with several dimensions of the personal and social realities of the Northern landscape. Numerous images of water and boats emphasize Ballycastle as a place from which one can leave and to which one can return. In the opening poem, “What Does ‘Early’ Mean?” (1988, 11), a house across the way evokes images of “ships and their wind-blown ways,” and in the final and title poem, a ship comes into harbor. Between these two, McGuckian takes us on a journey but never leaves “home.”

Yeats's painting also reinforces McGuckian's colors, one of the most intriguing and difficult of her image patterns. When asked what blue means in her poems, McGuckian has said that readers should look at the context in which the blue appears. A poem like “Scenes from a Brothel” (1988, 48-49) illustrates what she means more specifically:

Any colour lasts a second, three or four
Minutes at most—and can never be repeated.
So few words for so many colours.
This blue, this blue, an enfeebled red,
The child of old parents.
Though it is immutable, it has no more lustre
Than the moon in its first quarter,
Or the wall above the coat-stand.

The paradox of transient immutability is a key to much of what McGuckian writes about in On Ballycastle Beach, and she gives colors as many meanings as she creates contexts for them. There are warm colors—reds, golds, and browns—and they are associated with many things, including but not restricted to the sun, dying leaves, blood and bloodshed, men, wind, dreams, death. The coolness of blue appears in images of skies and water but is also often associated with women and with art: “Blue Vase,” “The Blue She Brings with Her,” “Woman with Blue-Ringed Bowl.”

That these properties of color also apply to words is confirmed, not only by the speaker in “Scenes from a Brothel,” who complains that there are “so few words for so many colours,” but also by the frustrated poets who speak, like the one imagining herself as a disintegrating painting in “Through the Round Window” (1988, 52):

I feel the room being torn to pieces, till no black
Is connected to any other black, my yellow
Pencil, my green table, can never be lit again.
Each poem in my alchemist's cupboard
That was an act of astonishment has a life
Of roughly six weeks, less than half a winter
Even in the child's sense of a week. …

The passage of time, and our attempts to capture, stop, or control it, appear in many of the poems in On Ballycastle Beach. In her explorations into the nature and limitations of time, McGuckian covers a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from Ireland's history to a vision of her own mother's death, and she ties them together in the volume in remarkable ways. Although the speaker in “Through the Round Window” describes how quickly, like color, the “act of astonishment” fades, many of the other poems in the volume focus on the staying power of art. Like many other poets, including Jack B. Yeats's brother, McGuckian presents art as one of our few defenses against the ravages of time and death, even if it does not always provide the reassurances we need.

As a tribute to that staying power, McGuckian turns to the Romantic poets, and to imaginative dream landscapes that outlast the dreamer.¹⁵ In “Coleridge” (1988, 34), boundaries of time and space collapse as a contemporary Irish woman poet meets her nineteenth-century male counterpart:

In a dream he fled the house
At the Y of three streets
To where a roof of bloom lay hidden
In the affectation of the night,
As only the future can be. Very tightly,
Like a seam, she nursed the gradients
Of his poetry in her head,
She got used to its movements like
A glass bell being struck
With a padded hammer.
It was her own fogs and fragrances
That crawled into the verse, the
Impression of cold braids finding
Radiant escape, as if each stanza
Were a lamp that burned between
Their beds, or they were writing
Their poems in a place of birth together

McGuckian's equation of the birth of a poem with that of a baby turns Coleridge into a female, who having “fled the house” discovers “some word that grew with him as a child's / Arm or leg.” We recognize in this image a persona we see in many of McGuckian's poems, one who finds in the night, away from the duties of mother and housewife, her poetic self. In separate beds, an allusion also to their own respective English and Irish birthplaces, these two poets nevertheless merge as his English lines echo through her head to be transformed by her Irish “fogs and fragrances.” Like many other poems in On Ballycastle Beach, “Coleridge” touches on questions of language and borrowings, how the Northern Irish female poet might change the language of the English male poet. Ultimately, this poem brings into focus one of the larger themes of the volume: the way in which poetry and art in general can transcend political, historical, and geographical boundaries.

In another, more overtly political poem, “Little House, Big House” (1988, 33), McGuckian again uses the images of houses and rooms to picture the way in which art can break down boundaries. Alluding to the big houses inhabited by English settlers, and the small homes of the Irish cottagers, the speaker imagines a different kind of house, where

On the ground floor, one room opens into another,
And a small Matisse in the inglenook
Without its wood fire is stroked by light
From north and south.

Here the house becomes an image for Ireland, described in the opening lines as “half-people, each with his separate sky.” But as the lines quoted above remind us, the same sun shines both north and south. If the Matisse painting, which represents the world beyond borders, replaces the fire in the inglenook, which suggests the conflict in Ireland, the light from both parts of Ireland can shine upon it.

The speaker in this poem shows how such an image affects her:

                                        That started all the feelings
That had slept till then, I came out
From behind the tea-pot to find myself
Cooled by a new arrangement of doorways

From earlier poems, we are familiar with McGuckian's shifting doorways, but in this volume the opening and closing of doors expands to include the borders of Ireland. Thinking about the house's “minstrel's gallery,” the speaker looks beneath the “tangled” house to its foundation: “our blood / Is always older than we will ever be.”

Many of the images McGuckian used in earlier poems to suggest a fractured self appear in this volume as metaphors for a divided Ireland, or for the troubled relationship between Ireland and England. Throughout the volume, the green, white, and gold of the flag of the Republic, and the blue, red, and white of the British flag, also have political significance.¹⁶

A reappearing woman on a beach is part of a larger pattern of imagery involving ships and travel.¹⁷ These images sometimes suggest a “flight,” like the earls described in “The Bird Auction” (1988, 50), whose leaving helped to create many of the troubles Northern Ireland has suffered. But they have other implications as well. In modern times many of Ulster's better-known poets have left, overwhelmed by the violence around them. In this context the meaning of home, and McGuckian's role as the best-known of Northern Ireland's women poets, takes on added significance, for the value she continually gives to house and home becomes a political statement as well. McGuckian has said that she was often tempted to leave but chose to stay because of family connections, roots, and a sense of belonging (1993a).

“But none of my removals,” says the speaker in the aptly-titled “Girls in the Plural” (1988, 42), “Was in any sense a flight,” contrasting herself to those “boys,” earls or poets, who have deserted Northern Ireland in its troubles. As Clair Wills says in her review of On Ballycastle Beach, “This is no mere abstract argument—other poets, such as Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon, in the grand tradition of Irish writers, have left Northern Ireland.” Quoting other lines from the volume, Wills explains that “McGuckian's abiding obsession with seeds, and her association of the womb with the growth of both words and children, suggest the possibility of a new type of ‘plantation’” (1988, 915). Even if she stays home, the McGuckian persona explains in “Four O'Clock, Summer Street” (1988, 31), her rooms can fly, given the right color: “I kept insisting / On robin's egg blue tiles around the fireplace / Which gives a room a kind of flying-heartedness.”

That McGuckian sees a difference between men and women on this issue is confirmed by the images in “For a Young Matron” (1988, 41):

An aeroplane unlike
A womb claims its space
And takes it with it.
It says, Once it wasn't like this.
But wood grows
Like the heart worn thin
Within us, or the original
Spirit of October.

The frustrated young matron speaking is a poet in the top floor of a house (which can “grow” from wood), listening to a “he” who asks her:

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

But McGuckian's women, especially her poets, do travel on words, always seeking an edgeless world. The rivers they move on lie within them; their flights are those of the imagination. Like the womb that encloses the life within it, they create worlds within themselves. And these women are anchored, as the poet herself is, to houses and to Ballycastle Beach.

The value of such anchoring appears in McGuckian's own mother, the subject of “Woman with Blue-Ringed Bowl,” (1988, 58), one of the final poems in the volume. Seeing her as the subject of a many-colored portrait, fit for a pen “that wrote in four colours,” McGuckian presents her as an Irish woman who maintained a home despite difficulties:

Though six vigorous soldiers have occupied her house,
She has cried out only once, and laughed without a wrinkle.
As wine comes stepping from stones, adding death to death,
A quarter of her blood shows like a scar at moments
Of excitement through her belted dress of dusky grey.
You would think it grey, but I think her dress
Is worthy of her mind, the semi-darkness
Of a poem composed after illness.
That evening, when I printed “THE END” in my black,
Floral, author's hand, on the blended orangey page,
I gave my youth to my mother, whose heart is not
Supposed to beat, even on the stairs, and said to the
Moroccan April, stay the way you are.
A gust of wind and colour flies to the door
That cannot be kept so narrow, my notebook lies
Useless as a womb on my knees. The blue ensnared
Is a careful, sad, a Marie-Louise blue,
And she has remained both woman and flaxen page:
But, when I saw the picture again, the sun had gone.

Having learned from an earlier poem that “any colour lasts a second, three or four / Minutes at most—and can never be repeated,” we understand the poet's response, and her own awareness that her mother's life, “ensnared” for a moment in color, is drawing to a close. In the face of death, womb and notebook, sources of creation, seem useless, as does the loving gesture of an enlightened child trying to give “youth” to her mother. Although she would like to keep her mother behind one of those doors her personae are always locking, the speaker here understands that when the sun is gone, “THE END” always comes, and nothing, even a Moroccan April, ever stays the way it is. Hence, the painter and the poet must try to catch the light: “Hold me in the light, she offers, turn me around, / Not the light controlled by a window, but the cool gold / Of turning leaves after their short career in the sky.”

While there are many themes, motifs, and images in this volume, “Woman with Blue-Ringed Bowl” encapsulates the unifying idea that ultimately we are all victims of time. The opening poem, “What Does ‘Early’ Mean?,” focuses our attention on the passage of time; and whether McGuckian is writing about domestic, political, or artistic life, whether she is describing seconds or hundreds of years, time is always an issue. Art, and especially poetry, become for her speakers a momentary defense against time, and the worlds of sleep and dream represent their entry into a timeless world of the imagination. As often as not, these women are waiting, not traveling in the usual sense, but staying home, finding themselves in what lies around them.

The ultimate message of On Ballycastle Beach is that leave-taking inevitably involves loss, an idea reinforced in the final and title poem (1988, 59), in which a child wandering on a beach is carried home to be read to:

I would read these words to you,
Like a ship coming in to harbour,
As meaningless and full of meaning
As the homeless flow of life
From room to homesick room.

Ship and house merge here, and the value of home, with its multiple meanings and many ramifications, comes through in the words and poems written by a “child of the North.”

The relationship of one generation to another, of children to parents, always a central theme in McGuckian's work, is also the subject of many of the poems in Marconi's Cottage (1991), and the problem of time is again central. The volume draws its title from a two-room cottage McGuckian purchased at the end of Ballycastle Beach. McGuckian says that she knew this house as a child and attaches a political significance to the fact that the cottage gives her a space in a landscape where the “Queen owns the other rocks.” Describing the spot as fostering her father's roots, McGuckian also sees the cottage as a peaceful alternative to the “hell of Belfast,” explaining that it became a retreat for her after a trip to the United States and a particularly trying time away from Ireland. Familial, political, and artistic themes surface in the volume as McGuckian explores both the personal and public meanings embedded in the image of the cottage.

Ballycastle has been associated with Marconi since 1898, when the scientist was struggling with the problem of transmitting wireless messages over water. Marconi's assistant, George Kemp, came to Ballycastle to see if it were possible to receive signals from a lighthouse on Rathlin Island. If so, ships at sea could signal to Rathlin and then to the mainland, where a telegraph office had been set up. Degna Marconi, in My Father Marconi (1962), describes the success of this venture: “At Ballycastle a 70-foot pole was erected and on August 25, George Kemp and an assistant named Glanville went to Rathlin. Near the lighthouse they put up a wire, first to 80, then 100 feet to clear the lighthouse. The assignment was accomplished and considered a marvel because there is a high cliff between Torr Head and Ballycastle” (63). The success of this venture showed that the wireless could cover great distances and make land-sea communication possible.

The metaphoric possibilities of such an image provide rich lore for McGuckian's poems. Marconi's cottage, as the backdrop for these poems, has significance on many levels. In evoking Marconi, McGuckian says she imagined the sea speaking to him and sees his work as an illustration of the way he responded to and understood nature.¹⁸ Voices coming over telephones and answering machines appear in these poems, and numerous poems suggest an analogy between Marconi's wireless communication and the work of the poet and artist. Allusions to Rilke, Rodin, Gwen John, Yeats, Balzac, Charlotte Brontë, and Sylvia Plath, among others, reinforce the need to see this volume as concerned with the artist's struggle to create and communicate.

Marconi's Cottage, like McGuckian's other volumes, is full of multiple voices, highlighting the tension arising from a woman's double role as mother and poet: the desire, on the one hand, to have another child, and, on the other, to commit herself fully to her writing. As is typical of McGuckian, these two roles intersect; the yet unconceived child dreamed about in the first part of the volume becomes the child celebrated in the later poems. Parallels between this child and the unwritten and written poem are developed throughout the volume.

The last poem, “On Her Second Birthday” (1991, 107-108), dedicated to McGuckian's daughter, Emer Mary Charlotte Rose,¹⁹ brings many of the preceding ideas and images into focus, reinforcing the imagery and tone of earlier poems. Sea, child, and poem merge as McGuckian's persona describes a characteristic process of change from mist to light. The speaker meditates:

It seems as though
To explain the shape of the world
We must fall apart,
Throw ourselves upon the world,
Slip away from ourselves
Through the world's inner road,
Whose atoms make us weary.

The result of this fragmentation, this journey, is seen in the second half of the poem, where the image of a shadow materializes as the speaker “ripened” into light. Like a message over water, a part of the speaker moves towards the sea:

But I flow outwards till I am something
Belonging to it and flower again
More perfectly everywhere present in it.
It believes in me,
It cannot do without me,
I know its name:
One day it will pass my mind into its body.

This image of conception and birth, of a part of self moving into something else, has numerous applications, not the least, given the dedication of the poem, to the daughter that this mother has produced. Lines in the beginning of the poem also allude to writing: “The wind like a soul / Seeking to be born / Carried off half / Of what I was able to say.” Like Marconi's message floating over water, however, the end of the poem suggests that the poet will “flower again” as her “mind” passes into the “body” of the poem.

Several other poems, including “Oval of a Girl” (addressed to “near-child, much-needed”), and “The Carrying Ring” (1991, 88-89), also highlight the birth of a daughter, emphasizing the parallel between different types of creation. Imagining the visible as “the carrying ring / For the invisible,” McGuckian describes in the latter poem the process of waiting, for a poem and a child:

                                        Each languageless flake
Of that night-filled mountain is a sleep
And all that labour is to have
An awareness of one's being
Added to one's being, like a first daughter:
The cloudy, the overcast, then
Something shone upon.

Repeating the imagery of night to day, darkness to light, shadow to shape that recurs frequently in her work, McGuckian emphasizes the value of waiting, until the sun shines through the clouds and the “child” is born.

If “On Her Second Birthday” and others celebrating the birth of a daughter create one tone in Marconi's Cottage, another pervades the volume as well. Linking birth with death, and beginnings with endings, many of these poems reflect McGuckian's awareness of the approaching death of her father, who was ill while she was writing these poems. One of the most lyrical and elegiac, “Echo-Poem” (1991, 67-69), represents a new direction for McGuckian in the simplicity of its language; it is also one of the most moving poems in the volume.

Acknowledging her meeting with a female figure of death, the speaker describes the consequences:

Now that I have kissed
Her sound awake,
She alliterates
With my father,
She unmoors him; though
I modify
His name by fond
Diminutives, she ties
Him to her stern.

If by conceiving a child, a woman sends off some part of herself into the world, in the death of her parent, she loses another part. Words associated with language and literature (“alliterates,” “modify,” “diminutives,” “war-odes,”) accentuate the link to writing, as does the identification of the figure of death with writing:

She will choose
Her body freely,
As a word chooses its meaning
Her shoulder-twist
And cleavage feeds
Some foam-born
Germ in me.

In the image of unmooring, McGuckian suggests that the writer may have as little control over words (“a word chooses its meaning”) as humans have over death.

In other poems, like “The Invalid's Echo,” “The Watch Fire,” and “The Rosary Dress” (where a father's death is compared to “a new kind of winter”), the awareness of a coming death appears in images of night, winter, invisibility. But death is also tied to new life in this volume; the last lines of “Charlotte's Delivery” (1991, 83) tell us: “In the wrecked hull of the fishing-boat / Someone has planted a cypress under the ribs.”

McGuckian herself suggests the cyclical structure of Marconi's Cottage and points to two poems, “Swallows' Wood, Glenshesk,” and “The Partner's Desk” as pivotal. In “The Partner's Desk” (1991, 70-71), a daughter and father both appear as the speaker mediates between them, McGuckian's familiar middle ground. Imagining a yet-to-be-born child, she describes a future where her own father is dead: “When I teach the continents / To my favourite daughter, my father is there / Though I do not see him.” Although the father's “mood is towards evening,” the bond between father, daughter, and granddaughter will survive. Reinforcing the generational links, the speaker's father, very much aware of his own mortality, tells his daughter of her own conception and birth: “‘The finest summer I can ever remember / Produced you.’”

In the final lines of “The Partner's Desk,” a persona speaks of the renewed rousing of her fingers, a metaphor for writing, as she describes the complicated feelings engendered by the overlapping birth of a daughter and death of a father:

                              … He will leave me
The school clock, the partner's desk, the hanging
Lamp, the head bearing the limbs, as I will leave her
The moonphase watch and the bud vase. I restart
My diary and reconstruct the days. I look upon
The life-bringing cloud as cardboard
And no reason for the life of another soul, yet still
Today is the true midsummer day.

Images of time, of clocks and watches, of seasons and months, of days and diaries, of generational inheritances, reinforce the overwhelming sense of time passing in this poem and throughout the volume. The “yet still” of the penultimate line, the coming to terms with what time delivers—both good and bad—illustrates one of the many structures on which Marconi's Cottage rests.

There are numerous images of writers and artists in Marconi's Cottage, a good number of the allusions focused on the hardships individual artists endured.²⁰ The struggle to create within a framework of other obligations, as well as the difficulty of persevering through the intense process of creation, is highlighted in these allusions. In “East of Mozart” (1991, 64-66), the musician's tempestuous isolation is compared to the poet's:

But some words like some notes
That never pronounce themselves,
Are meant for at most
Ten people in the world
Whose oxygen is storms.

Two female artists who appear in these poems, the painters Paula Modersohn-Becker and Gwen John, also struggled with some of the same problems McGuckian's personae express. Both are pictured in difficult relationships with male artists, John with Rodin, Modersohn-Becker with Rilke.

Paula Modersohn-Becker, who died after giving birth, was a close friend of Rilke's and the subject of his poem “Requiem für eine Freundin” (Rilke 1982, 72-87). In her study of Rilke, Patricia Pollock Brodsky explains that the more successful she became, the more the artist “feared being swallowed up, neutralized, by the traditional expectations of her family, husband and society” (1988, 17). Rilke's poem addresses these issues, lamenting the fact that her maternity led directly to her death. At the end of the poem, Rilke moves into more general questions about the relationship between life and art.²¹

In “To Call Paula Paul” (1991, 16-19), McGuckian calls attention to Modersohn-Becker's work. The speaker “embraces” the painter and suggests that they share “mother-to-be dreams,” and an important image is the artist's wrist. The speaker describes her relationship with this other woman artist:

I did nothing, I didn't cry:
I held the permanent bangle on her wrist
For a long time. In the bright July
My window seemed too big, all day
Long to insult me, with its pale heaven,
Putting supple hands around my throat.

The image of a strangled voice suggested in the last line above is reinforced when Paula's face is seen in a “sordid light” and the mouth of the wind “outshouts” the speaker who identifies with Modersohn-Becker's conflict.

There can be no doubt here that the relationship between the artist and the mother, with Modersohn-Becker's tragic death after childbirth in the background, influences not only this poem but others in Marconi's Cottage as well. A woman's concern over bearing another child, and its effect on her writing career, is clearly expressed in this poem. Turning Paula into Paul, the masculine name suggesting the more traditionally “male” career of writer, McGuckian explores the conflict between the artist and “mother-to-be dreams,” an intercourse the speaker and subject of this poem share.

In another poem, “Road 32, Roof 13-23, Grass 23” (1991, 42-43), McGuckian considers the tangled life of Gwen John. To identify tones, John had developed a color system based on combining the numbers 1, 2, and 3, recording in notebooks the colors in each of her paintings. The poem's title refers to this system, one we can connect with the recurring colors that take on numerous meanings in McGuckian's poems.

A number of characteristics would attract McGuckian to John: she shared the turmoil McGuckian describes in so many of these poems; many of John's paintings feature rooms and interiors, which figure so prominently in McGuckian's work as well; and, as Mary Taubman explains, John's “closely woven interaction of self and subject is a unifying theme running through her entire oeuvre from youth to maturity (1985, 11).²²

McGuckian's poem begins as a portrait of John, highlighted by its color, which emphasizes the woman's suffering:

The dark wound her chestnut hair
Around her neck like the rows of satin trimming
On a skirt with three flounces.
She pressed firmly down the sides of her eyes
The colour of the stem of the wild geranium
And of the little ball holding the snowdrop petals.

In this poem, as in others in Marconi's Cottage, red is identified both with art and with suffering, the connection reinforcing the theme that the artist's life is often fraught with pain.

John met Rodin in 1904 while working for him as a model, and they soon became lovers. John's relationship with Rodin greatly influenced her melancholic life, though the significance of her work seems not to have been acknowledged between them.

McGuckian describes a conflict between different women embodied in John. Rodin knew one as the woman who wrote daily, loving letters to him; McGuckian imagines the other as totally different:

She slept with his letter in her hand,
And the longest letter she wrote
Was on the back of his letter
To a woman who never existed.

The darkness and mists so prevalent elsewhere in Marconi's Cottage appear in this poem as well, suggesting how John's gloomy, sunless life was overshadowed by Rodin:

She did not light the lamp or the fire,
Though he lit a station of candles
In wine bottles for their first kiss;
The candlelight left a film of woodsmoke
Over everything. Her fear of light began
While his coat still hung over a chair,
The window seemed a picture eased out of her,
She did not want her own face there.

On one level, the images in this poem allude to Rodin and John and the struggles she had combining two lives. But they also connect to recurring images in all of McGuckian's work: images of dark, light, smoke, mist, rain, letters, doors. The woman artist and writer, who in McGuckian's poems must close one door in order to open another, is epitomized in figures like Gwen John and Paula Modersohn-Becker.

The tone and imagery of Marconi's Cottage consistently demonstrate that the struggle to create and communicate involves pain. Drawing on the conventional association of winter with death and spring with rebirth, McGuckian sees art as the offspring of suffering, poetry as the fruit of winter, and the garden the reward for having come through. The seasons and months of the year, as well as the cycle of conception, birth, life, and death, unify the volume and express ultimately that for every loss there is a gain, for every death a birth. The final poems in the volume portray a woman who has survived, who has confronted both the power of death and the difficulty of writing. In “Teraphim” (1991, 104-5), the mystery is accepted, and the ordeal of waiting through the difficult times is described as the “mist in which we are swallowed” that “allows a garden to be planted, / To breathe with our breath.” This breathing alludes to the image of the child which appears often in the volume and to the work of the artist, more specifically the poet.

In the title poem, “Marconi's Cottage” (1991, 103), the speaker addresses the cottage: “Maybe you are a god of sorts, / Or a human star, lasting in spite of us”; in “Red Armchair” (102), another speaker says: “If my father dies in the wasted arms of summer, / The sudden warm flood of his melted life / Will make new constellations.” At its most universal level, Marconi's Cottage is about gods and stars, about the possibility of light when darkness seems overwhelming. This is an elemental volume, with earth, air, fire and water prominent images. In “The Watch Fire” (53-54), McGuckian tells us, “When spring hesitates / We must wait for it.” For McGuckian's female personae the end result of this waiting is new life: both the child and the poem.

As we can see, consistent themes and images run throughout McGuckian's work, and, as I suggested in the beginning of this chapter, her subject is almost always the relationship between the different facets of a woman's life. Her poetry, especially the more recent work, is decidedly autobiographical, and details, if one is willing to accept her linguistic experiments, the most profound human experiences. McGuckian is much concerned with the role of the woman artist, but within the larger framework of women's multiple lives.

In one of her more subtle but extremely significant responses to the male tradition of Irish writing, McGuckian introduces a new image in the poem “Sky-Writing” (1991, 79), as she alludes to Yeats's famous poem, “Leda and the Swan.” Talking from the sky to the town below her, Leda becomes a typical McGuckian heroine, describing her escape: “I forfeit the world outside / For the sake of my own inwardness.” Like Yeats's Leda, McGuckian's speaker is swept away, but she is making her own choices: “I abandon myself to its incubative weight,” she says, distinguishing herself from the helpless Leda over whom Zeus has total power. Again seeing writing as intercourse with her muse, Leda here poses the Yeatsian question: “Being seen like this by you, / A steeply perched, uplooking town, / Am I the same in a more strengthened way?” The final lines of this poem rewrite Yeats's drama, as a woman poet expresses how she feels after this union:

I am on the point of falling
Like the essence of rain or a letter
Of ungiveable after-love into the next degree
Of spring, its penultimate tones:
Shall I ever again be caught up gently
As the rustle of a written address by the sky?

In this new version of intercourse with the gods, Leda is speaking, not spoken about. She has become the female poet, not the subject of the male poet, and is willing to abandon herself to the “incubative weight” of her own inwardness for some “Sky-Writing.” The struggle described in this poem is a far cry from Yeats's image of a woman raped, and an important difference arises from the fact that in this poem Leda appears not as passive female but as willing participant in the development of her own “inwardness.” In this poem, as in much of McGuckian's other work, the value of a very complex female consciousness, with all its multiple voices and variants, cannot be overestimated. “Sky-Writing” is about pregnancy and poetry.

Notes

1. Two earlier publications, Single Ladies and Portrait of Joanna, were issued in 1980.

2. Nuala Archer's other works, both published in Ireland, include Whale on the Line (1981) and The Hour of Pan/Amá (1992). Born in the United States of Irish parents, Archer has also lived in Ireland and Latin and Central America. Her extensive travels are reflected in the varied settings and experimental techniques of her latest poems.

3. The Flower Master won both the Rooney Prize and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award.

4. Byron also notes the originality of McGuckian's work as she compares her to Emily Dickinson, a woman poet misunderstood in her time:

   the image-areas she draws on are astonishingly similar to Emily Dickinson's: the house, the room, its windows and its furnishings; snow, and the voyaged-over sea; exotic places, exotic (and native) flowers; extremes of pain and love expressed in terms of the tension between male and female; light, whiteness, the colour blue. The list could continue, and be refined. But what is perhaps most striking is the way in which the McGuckian voice speaks from this nexus of images with the dizzying swings of reference and the syntactical high-wire acts so reminiscent of her predecessor.

   (1988, 16-17)

   Although time, nations, and distance separate these two poets, the similarities Byron describes point to the value of exploring the ways in which women poets not only relate to one another but also circumscribe a world different from that of male poets.

5. James McElroy (1989) takes a similar theoretical approach.

6. The struggle involved in this union with the muse recurs in many poems. In “Ode to a Poetess” (1984, 11-12), McGuckian makes it clear that although Keats is in the background, she is seeing the problem from a woman's point of view:

   Now you are in a poem of your own cold
   Making, on your second fret, your life knit
   Like a bird's, when amid the singing
   Of the Sparrow Hills, you yourself could not sing.
   It is ten o'clock, I am thinking of those
   Eyes of yours as of something just alighted
   On the earth, the why that had to be in them.
   What they ask of women is less their bed,
   Or an hour between two trains, than to be almost gone,

   the woman “almost gone” (a postmodernist reading might also describe her as “almost there”) is the most pervasive motif in McGuckian's poetry. Michael O'Neill in a review of Venus and the Rain argues that in “Ode to a Poetess” McGuckian “insists mockingly on the absence of the ‘male principle’ from the poem” (1984, 63).

7. The ambivalence McGuckian's women speakers feel toward sexual desire, the sharing of the self, and the potential for swelling ovaries, recurs as a theme in the volume. In “Ducks and Drakes” (1982, 20), for example, a woman acknowledges how she freely gives herself to a man, declaring: “Not … / That I needed persuading / Even my frowns were beautiful, my tenable / Emotions largely playing with themselves, / To be laid like a table set for breakfast.” The final lines of the poem reinforce the mixed emotions a woman may have about intercourse and childbearing. In another poem, “The Dowry Murder” (1982, 38), the speaker, very conscious of her sexual desire, imagines “a last kiss, your clutch on my ordinary stem, / Then your head falling off into a drawer.” McGuckian has said that she intended here not only the traditional linking of intercourse and death but also the mixed feelings that a woman might have toward the object of her desires.

8. Mary Queen of Scots was forced to abdicate in favor of her son, James VI of Scotland, and was later executed.

9. See also Beer 1992, which draws on Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace to examine McGuckian's work.

10. These comments and others in this chapter not otherwise attributed are from conversations I had with McGuckian in 1990 in the United States and in 1992 and 1994 in Ireland.

11. We might see these as versions of Cixous's “separate people” mentioned earlier, “the springing up of selves one didn't know.”

12. Eileen Cahill, offering a valuable reading of McGuckian's “middle voice,” a “position of greyness” that “allows McGuckian to interrogate oppositions” (1994, 266), points to a number of poems in which this “grayness” is a central image.

13. On Ballycastle Beach is dedicated to McGuckian's father, Hugh Albert McCaughan, and her son, Hugh Oisin. Venus and the Rain is dedicated to her mother, Margaret Fergus, and her mother-in-law, Mary McAuley.

14. Yeats's fusion and blending of colors, the blurring of lines in the painting, reinforce themes in the volume as well. The blue of the sea and the sky is actually a combination of colors. Sea, sky, and beach interpenetrate and, while we see them as separate, the boundaries between them are not always clearly defined. From a knowledge of McGuckian's earlier poetry, in which boundaries are continually shifting, we can see parallels between the two artists' work. For more on Jack B. Yeats, see White 1971.

15. Calvin Bedient maintains that McGuckian is not “Catholic Ireland's daughter, after all—or not enough; when it comes to push and shove, she's the heir, however captious, of the Romantics” (1990, 196).

16. In an interview with Susan Shaw Sailer conducted in Belfast in 1990 (1993a) McGuckian said that the poems “The Dream-Language of Fergus” and “A Dream in Three Colours” were both political poems, the first concerned with her son learning English, not Irish, the second with her wish that “we could all be English and all Irish and all Europeans.”

17. These women include the mythic figures Grainne and Pomona. Though there are several ships, and even some airplanes, they do not sail or fly. McGuckian's “First Letters from a Steamer” (1988, 28) is a poem about a steamy spring that comes after four perfect springs. As the sea this season “turns on / Another light,” the speaker learns, on her own voyage of discovery, how to borrow some sunlight to get through foggy days. Likewise, in “Lighthouse with Dead Leaves” (1988, 32), the speaker never leaves the house, even though “All wounds began to glow, / And lighthouses sprang to mind.” This woman sets out on the kind of journey we are used to in McGuckian's poetry: “I have locked my bedroom door from the inside, / And do not expect it to be mutilated. / My garb is chosen for a dry journey.”

18. McGuckian discussed Marconi's Cottage with me in Galway in July 1992. Some of the following comments and quotations draw on that conversation.

19. McGuckian already had three sons.

20. For example, the poem “Journal Intime” reminds us of the writer Henri-Frédéric Amiel's Journal Intime, his account of long years of suffering. Amiel's continual search for the relationship between the real and the ideal, his fascination with the invisible shadow world McGuckian explores in many of the poems in this volume, is reflected in his journal.

    Amiel's journal entry for October 4, 1873, parallels some of the feelings reflected in McGuckian's poems:

    I have been dreaming a long time while in the moonlight, which floods my room with a radiance, full of vague mystery. The state of mind induced in us by this fantastic light is itself so dim and ghost-like that analysis loses its way in it, and arrives at nothing articulate. It is something indefinite and intangible, like the noise of waves, which is made up of a thousand fused and mingled sounds. It is the reverberation of all the unsatisfied desires of the soul, of all the stifled sorrows of the heart, mingling in a vague sonorous whole, and dying away in cloudy murmurs.

    (268-69)

    Many of Amiel's images appear likewise in McGuckian's poems; they share a world of dreams, ghosts, mystery, moonlight, sea, waves, and clouds, a state where sorrow reverberates, and “analysis loses its way” and often “arrives at nothing articulate.” It is not hard to see Marconi's Cottage as McGuckian's own Journal Intime. Mrs. Humphry Ward's introduction to her translation of Amiel's Journal Intime provides a good nineteenth-century view of Amiel's work.

21. Brodsky provides more details on this subject. Rilke often wrote about death, and many of his poems are requiems. Brodsky describes the influence of Jens Peter Jacobsen, saying that Rilke “came to believe that each person has a death of his own, as uniquely his as his life had been. He also frequently uses the image of death as the core or seed of a fruit: death is placed within us to ripen. For women, giving birth also implies bearing a death along with each life they create” (1988, 30). In a poem written in 1900 about Paula Modersohn-Becker and the sculptor Clara Westhoff, later his wife, Rilke warns both women about giving up their art (which he defines as a feeling in their wrist), for the more conventional life of a woman. These concerns are central to McGuckian's poems as well.

22. McGuckian's attraction to late Victorian and turn-of-the-century life and art (like Gwen John's) is also illustrated throughout her work.