SOURCE: Daniels, Kate. “Ireland's Best.” Southern Review 35, no. 2 (1999): 387-402.

In the following essay, Daniels compares and contrasts the themes and style of Shelmalier with those of Eavan Boland's The Lost Land and Derek Mahon's The Yellow Book, delineating each poets’ relationship to the patriarchal traditions of Ireland.

If one were to compose a scale of oppositions upon which to consider contemporary poetry by Irish women, the Dublin poet Eavan Boland (b. 1944) would appear at one end, and Medbh McGuckian (b. 1951), from Belfast, at the other. Although their work is fundamentally different—Boland the mistress of a highly cadenced, formalistic verse that favors “a lyric speech, a civil tone” (to use her own words), and McGuckian the wielder of nonlinear, surrealistic pieces—both women share a preoccupation with the liberation of Irish poetry from the historical grip of male readers and writers. As well, their work assaults on many...