SOURCE: Haberstroh, Patricia Boyle. “Medbh McGuckian.” In Women Creating Women, edited by Patricia Boyle Haberstroh, pp. 123-58. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Haberstroh evaluates the language and style of McGuckian's poems in light of specific conflicts and ambivalences encountered by the contemporary Irish woman poet.

Medbh McGuckian's poetry has elicited a great deal of interest since the publication of her first major volume. The Flower Master, in 1982.¹ Born in Northern Ireland, she was the first woman to be recognized among the “Northern Voices,” the Ulster poets who came to prominence in the 1970s. Chosen as first woman poet-in-residence at Queens University in Belfast, McGuckian has been described both as “the most white-hot Irish poet since Yeats” (1990, 210) and as a writer whose work “cheerfully and explicitly ignores the risk of choking on its own exclusivity” (1992, 20). By 1991, McGuckian had published three other volumes: Venus and...