Medbh McGuckian: A Threader of Double-Stranded Words (2024)

Medbh McGuckian: A Threader of Double-Stranded Words (1) Sympathetic Ink: Intertextual Relations in Northern Irish Poetry

Shane Alcobia-Murphy

Published:

2006

Online ISBN:

9781846314148

Print ISBN:

9781846310324

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Shane Alcobia-Murphy

Shane Alcobia-Murphy

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Pages

43–92

  • Published:

    October 2006

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Alcobia-Murphy, Shane, 'Medbh McGuckian: A Threader of Double-Stranded Words', Sympathetic Ink: Intertextual Relations in Northern Irish Poetry (Liverpool, 2006; online edn, Liverpool Scholarship Online, 20 June 2013), https://doi.org/10.5949/liverpool/9781846310324.003.0003, accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

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Abstract

This chapter analyses the poetry of Medbh McGuckian. Three essential objections underlie critical attacks of McGuckian's poetry: first, that her work is deliberately obfuscatory; second, that she has imperfectly absorbed the influence of both literary peers and precursors; and third, that her poems lack coherent subject matter. All three are reductive misreadings of McGuckian's oeuvre. The chapter offers a corrective account by redirecting critical attention towards her peculiar method of composition, focusing especially on her hitherto unnoticed strategies of quotation. It demonstrates that McGuckian's poetic texts are made up from quotations exhumed from other writers' work (critical prose, biographies, memoirs, plays, poems, etc.) and then rearranged to form centos, poems where a multitude of voices intersect. A McGuckian poem is not white noise; rather, it is a structure of harmonies, conversations, and intertextual dialogues.

Keywords: Northern Irish poets, poetry, women poets, quotation, composition, intertextuality

Subject

Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)

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