SOURCE: Batten, Guinn. “‘The More with Which We are Connected’ The Muse of the Minus in the Poetry of McGuckian and Kinsella.” In Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, edited by Anthony Bradley and Maryann Gialanella Valiulis, pp. 212-44. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Batten explores the thematic and stylistic effects of “nothingness” or “absence” in the poetry of McGuckian and Thomas Kinsella.

When we make nature over again, The experience not bright, the thought not red, The soul being a substance cannot explain Just that red as felt in the room or bed: 

Or how the rest of the merely understandable World, whose art of persistence is to be dead, Enters like twilight perched in her disrobing The more with which we are connected. 

Medbh McGuckian, “Vibratory Description”

The sterile: it is a whole matter in itself. 

Fantastic millions of fragile 

in every...