SOURCE: Docherty, Thomas. “Postmodern McGuckian.” In The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland, edited by Neil Corcoran, pp. 191-210. Chester Springs, Penn: Dufour Editions Inc., 1992.

In the following essay, Docherty assesses McGuckian's poetry in terms of its concern with ritual, its “ idealist” subjectivity, and its links with surrealism.

McGuckian's poetry is pointless, in a sense akin to the way in which Molly Bloom's soliloquy is without point, unpunctuated or unpunctual. A typical sentence meanders around a point, apostrophically veering from it whenever it seems to be about to touch ground, so to speak:

                              You call me aspen, tree of the woman's Tongue, but if my longer and longer sentences Prove me wholly female, I'd be persimmon, And good kindling, to us both.(1) 

It has become fashionable to read McGuckian as a poet whose language, grammar and syntax all serve to question masculinism, and to...