SOURCE: Wills, Clair. “In Time's Turning.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5009 (2 April 1999): 26.

In the following review, Wills evaluates the style and themes of Shelmalier.

Some years ago, the Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian made the startling confession that “I began to write poetry so that nobody would read it. Even the ones who read it would not understand it, and certainly no other poet would understand it”. There could hardly be better ammunition for those who accuse contemporary poets of wilful obscurity. And even readers sympathetic to McGuckian must sometimes find themselves fighting off a sense of exasperation. Take these lines from “Shelmalier”, the title poem of her new book:

Looked after only by the four womb-walls, if anything curved in the ruined city his last hour it was his human hands, bituminous, while all                                                                                                               laws were aimed at him, returning to the metre of a                                                                                                               star: like a...