Medbh McGuckian came to prominence as a poet even before the publication of her first full-length book when, in 1979, she won the National Poetry Competition, a well-publicized media event in Britain, with her poem "The Flitting." When a pamphlet of her work, Portrait of Joanna, appeared in the following year, it was glowingly reviewed by the poet Anne Stevenson in the London Times Literary Supplement: "She is as clever (probably) as Craig Raine, as perceptive (possibly) as Elizabeth Bishop.... The wealth of exteriors explored by Medbh McGuckian's poems augurs the flowering of a talent which, fortunately, seems too original--too eccentric, even--to be wrongly directed by over-praise or by critical misunderstanding. She sounds, at times, like a contemporary, Irish Emily Dickinson. Flat, coy, confusing when she fails, her successes are dazzling, and her continued syntheses of looking and thinking, fascinating."

The anxiety about "over-praise" was prompted, presumably, by the...