Stephanie Schwerter, Northern Irish Poetry and the Russian Turn: Intertextuality in the Work of Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 235-238
Author(s):  
Michael McAteer
Keyword(s):  
Seamus Heaney ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Medbh Mcguckian ◽  
Irish Poetry

Medbh McGuckian

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Hanna
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Medbh Mcguckian ◽  
Paul Muldoon ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Irish Poetry ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Queen's University ◽  
Ciaran Carson

Medbh McGuckian (born Maeve McCaughan on 12 August 1950) is one of the most prominent members of the second generation of poets who emerged from Northern Ireland during the course of the Troubles (an ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland during the late 20th century). Her work is often considered alongside that of her Northern Irish contemporaries Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon, and Tom Paulin. After receiving her secondary education at a Dominican convent, she studied for an English degree at Queen’s University Belfast (1968–1972). She was taught, along with fellow students Paul Muldoon and Frank Ormsby, by Seamus Heaney. She received her Master of Arts (MA) degree from the same university in 1974. Her first poem, “Marriage,” was published in The Honest Ulsterman in 1975 and, under the pseudonym “Jean Fisher,” she won the National Poetry Competition in 1979 for her poem “The Flitting.” She published two chapbooks in 1980, Portrait of Joanna and Single Ladies: Sixteen Poems, and she received an Eric Gregory Award in the same year. Her first full collection, The Flower Master, was published by Oxford University Press in 1982. Since then she has produced over a dozen single-authored collections of poetry, as well as chapbooks, anthologies, collaborations, translations, and prose works. Her collections of poetry include Venus and The Rain (1984), Marconi’s Cottage (1991), Captain Lavender (1994) and, most recently, Love, The Magician (2018). She was the first woman to hold the post of writer in residence at Queen’s University Belfast (1985–1988) and she has also held a visiting writer position at the University of California, Berkeley (1991). Her early work is notable for its focus on the female body and femininity and, while not relinquishing these, she has turned toward increasingly explicitly political themes since the mid-1990s. The reception of her work has been complicated by two distinguishing divergences from typical practice. The first is the variance of her compositional techniques from that of most of her contemporaries. She frequently employs a collagistic approach, often constructing her poems by combining lines from source material. Several critics (notably Clair Wills and Shane Alcobia-Murphy) have strenuously defended her from the potential accusations of plagiarism that might arise from this practice, focusing instead on the alchemical potential of her techniques of selection and combination. McGuckian’s admirers have drawn attention to the ways in which the words of others are reborn and given new identities and meanings in her poetry. McGuckian has also joined defenders of her work, notably Shane Alcobia-Murphy, in asking why male authors who have engaged in similar practices have not been subjected to the same scrutiny as she has. The sometimes divergent answers that she has given in her many interviews with critics have conditioned the reception of her work. Unsympathetic responses to her strange, discontinuous poems started to appear in the early 1980s and continue in the early 21st century. However, despite the necessity of, at times, challenging routes to its appreciation, her poetry has been widely praised and recognized as well, with several critics hailing her as a major contemporary voice in Irish poetry.

scholarly journals Medbh McGuckian and Ecofeminist Anxiety: “The Contingency of Befalling”

2020 ◽  
pp. 53-64
Author(s):  
Mª Jesús Lorenzo-Modia ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Seamus Heaney ◽  
Women's Issues ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Medbh Mcguckian ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Climate Crisis

The present article analyses Medbh McGuckian’s “The Contingency of Befalling”, an unpublished poem dealing with present-day climate crisis from an ecofeminist stance. Arguably, the poet is part of the Northern Irish elegiac trend in dealing with issues of her country, but she departs from a male-dominated tradition and connects lament with ethical, political, national, ecological and women’s issues. This poem is related to those in her recent book Marine Cloud Brightening (2019), in which she included mournful poems for both her brother and other Irish poets who passed away in recent times, with special attention to Seamus Heaney. McGuckian’s vision of the situation of the earth and of those living in it is gloomy, and she connects it with hardship, should rulers’ policies remain unchanged.

‘Fine contrary excess’: Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Thomas’s Northern Irish Afterlives

2019 ◽  
pp. 215-232
Author(s):  
Tom Walker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Irish Literature ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Seamus Heaney ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
The Public ◽  
Irish Poetry ◽  
The Impact

Dylan Thomas’s work is indebted in many ways to the two giants of early twentieth-century Irish literature, W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, as many critics have acknowledged. Yet Thomas’s work has also left legacies of its own within subsequent Irish writing. As Seamus Heaney commented in his 1993 Oxford Professor of Poetry lecture on Thomas, the Welsh poet was a key ‘part of the initiation’ of his postwar ‘11+ generation into literary culture’, not only through his books but also through his broadcasts and recordings. This chapter argues that within modern Irish poetry, and especially Northern Irish poetry, not least against the backdrop of the failures of the Northern Irish political status quo, Thomas’s work has helped to open up an alternate and less restrictive sense of the poet’s place in relation to the public realm. The impact of Thomas’s adolescent notebook mining and poetic responses to war, as well as the whimsy of his prose and radio work, are traced in this chapter, especially in relation to the work of Heaney and Derek Mahon.

Sympathetic Ink: Intertextual Relations in Northern Irish Poetry

2007 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neal Alexander ◽  
Shane Alcobia-Murphy ◽  
Richard Kirkland
Keyword(s):  
Northern Irish ◽  
Irish Poetry

Voicing ‘the native tang of idiom’: Lagan Magazine, 1943–1946

2020 ◽  
pp. 273-292
Author(s):  
Tara McEvoy
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Seamus Heaney ◽  
Regional Literature ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Limited Success ◽  
Writing Community ◽  
Post War

This chapter analyses the short-lived Northern Irish periodical Lagan, published annually between 1943 and 1946. Edited by John Boyd, the magazine, over its limited run of only four issues, sought to foster a vital tradition of Ulster writing. Short stories published in Lagan served to promote Ulster idiom as the basis for a new regional literature. While regionalism could often be perceived as insularism, which perhaps contributed to the magazine’s limited success, Lagan arguably provided a cultural touchstone for Northern Irish writers, thus proving influential for a post-war generation that included the likes of Seamus Heaney, James Simmons, and Derek Mahon. In spite of being short-lived, therefore, Lagan and its editor successfully sought to promote a creative tradition and writing community in Northern Ireland.

Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space by Adam Hanna

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 155-157
Author(s):  
Julia C. Obert
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Space ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Irish Poetry
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