SOURCE: Matthews, Steven. Review of The Flower Master and Other Poems, by Medbh McGuckian. Times Literary Supplement, no. 4750 (15 April 1994): 26.

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...