[In the following review, Matthews praises the revised edition of The Flower Master, commenting on McGuckian's literary method and the volume's content.]

Medbh McGuckian's poetry studiously and notoriously resists paraphrase. It is protective towards its influences and origins, being concerned to present the essence of experience rather than its surface events. This is poetry full of the weather, flowers, the seasons, trees, earth, water, the sun, the moon, shifting light. Images of the familial, of nurture and fructification predominate.

Our experience of reading the poems is of witnessing a phrase or image exfoliate from the previous one. We are shown “Tricks [we] might guess from this unfastened button, / A pen mislaid, a word misread”, and are left guessing, as the poem continues to hold the hiding-places of its fertility to itself. From line to line, from poem to poem, from collection to collection, McGuckian plays complex variations around and through her essential themes in an ever-open, playful, continuing exploration of nuance and possibility. The slightly hallucinatory quality of the writing; the sense of wandering from image to image, almost from sentence to sentence; the sense of slippage between images and sentences: all leave the relation between poem and world suggestively tenuous yet full of potential.

The revisions in this new edition of her first collection, The Flower Master (1982), confirm the intensity and coherence of McGuckian's poetic preoccupations and method throughout the past twelve years. Not only are there poems here which did not appear in the original edition, but twelve of the poems which appeared there have now been dropped. In the process, The Flower Master has become a much tighter, more concentrated book; nearly all of the poems now engage with floral imagery, either as generating idea, or metaphorical resource. The repositioning of poems which originally stood on their own as part of mini-sequences in this new version only furthers the sense of accumulation and concentration among and between the various parts of the book. McGuckian's are poems which always work through dialogue, the one with the other, and the addition of seventeen poems which did not appear in the first version of the collection sharpens the book's range of tones and adds a welcome note of scepticism towards its presiding theme.

The book's revised dedication, “for my mother without my father”, indicates the centre of The Flower Master's concerns, a concentration on the female and the poet's own move through a sense of adolescent potential and exuberance to the attainment of adult love. But even this narrative remains subliminal, oblique. The idea of the flower master that oversees the collection establishes its language of flowers as the language of both the poet's and the poetry's sources. As the title poem has it, here, “We learn the coolness of straight edges, how / To stroke gently the necks of daffodils / And make them throw their heads back to the sun.”

There could be something complaisant about the way such descriptions can always be made to stand as metaphors for the manner and method of the poetry, however, and it is a virtue of some of the new poems that they bring a heightened level of self-consciousness, which allows such slippages around notions of organicism to be questioned. In “Gladiolus”, we are told that this flower's “only aim” is “the art / of making oneself loved”; in “Spring”, a poem which lends weight to the uneasy, frustrated adolescence in the book's early poems, the narrator rises from bed “To stare at the February moon. // … My breathing marbled the pane: / There was my face in the window, / Frosted, so hard to see through.” This is an opaqueness which is alert to the dangers of self-regard in any mastery of image and form, and it enlivens the note of protectiveness which continues in other of the additional poems. “No one knows what goes on inside a clock”, the last line of “My Mother” tells us; it is the achievement of this new edition of The Flower Master that it manages to make McGuckian's continued sense of the untranslatability of the sources of nurture more concentrated, but also more various and more questionable than it was in the book's original form.