Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian

This book comprehensively looks at the oeuvre of a major Irish woman poet, Medbh McGuckian. It positions her oeuvre as political, historical poetry crafted through the poetics of silence: a defamiliarized English, a reliance on the image, and the deployment of multiple forms of intertextuality.

Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian is an innovative contribution to the scholarship on Belfast poet, Medbh McGuckian. This book considers the entire oeuvre of this globally respected Irish woman writer, a member of the contemporary avant-garde with now fifteen (U.S. published) volumes and numerous individual publications. The author positions McGuckian’s oeuvre as political and historical poetry and offers a provocative new assessment of its crafted silences. This work argues that it is the muted character of McGuckian’s poems—a consequence of a defamiliarized language, the overwhelming sway of the image, and a profusion of intertextual quoting—that constitutes their agency and force. The sciences are read as a response to the precarious positionality of poet and speaker at the site of “disaster” and the limits of articulacy. This book argues, in line with Rukeyser’s notion of the life of poetry, the life of silenceis located in the poems’ production, as revealed and embodied self-reflexively, and the exponential prolonging of its consumption. This oeuvre, in its public reception, operates as a formidable counter-discourse by converting the reading into a much protracted task that redistributes the temporal economy of poetry and disrupts given, everyday structures of time, place, and the order of things.