Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Marconi's Cottage by Medbh McGuckian Marconi's Cottage by Medbh McGuckian. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 658829f30cd415fc • Your IP : 188.246.226.140 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Medbh McGuckian. Medbh McGuckian was born in 1950 to Catholic parents in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she now lives with her family. She studied with Seamus Heaney at Queen’s University, earning a BA and MA, and later returned as their first female writer-in-residence. She is the author of over 20 poetry collections including most recently Love, The Magician (2018), Blaris Moor (2015), The High Caul Cap (2012), and The Currach Requires No Harbours (2010). Her poems are layered collages of feminine and domestic imagery complicated by a liminal, active syntax that, in drawing attention to the weight of one phrase on another, emphasizes and questions our constructions of power and gender. Her work is reminiscent of Rainer Maria Rilke in its emotional scope and John Ashbery in its creation of rich interior landscapes. Praising McGuckian’s Selected Poems (1997), Heaney said, “Her language is like the inner lining of consciousness, the inner lining of English itself, and it moves amphibiously between the dreamlife and her actual domestic and historical experience as a woman in late-20th-century Ireland.” McGuckian has earned significant critical acclaim over the course of her career. Her poem “The Flitting,” published under a male pseudonym, won the 1979 National Poetry Competition. In 1980 McGuckian published two chapbooks and also won the prestigious Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, The Flower Master (1982), won the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and an award from the Ireland Arts Council. On Ballycastle Beach (1988) won the Cheltenham Award, and The Currach Requires No Harbour (2007) was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Her most recent collections include Love, the Magician (2018) and Selected Poems 1978- 1994 (2018). Her honors also include the Bass Ireland Award for Literature, the Denis Devlin Award, and the American Ireland Fund’s Literary Award. She won the Forward Prize for Best Poem for “She Is in the Past, She Has This Grace.” She is a member of the selective Irish arts association Asodána. She edited The Big Striped Golfing Umbrella: Poems by Young People from Northern Ireland (1985) and cotranslated, with Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, the Irish poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s collection The Water Horse (1999). She is also the author of Horsepower Pass By! A Study of the Car in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (1999). McGuckian, Medbh. “I know being a woman for me for a long time was being less, being excluded, being somehow cheap, being inferior, being sub. I associated being a woman with being a Catholic and being Irish with being from the North, and all of these things being not what you wanted to be. If you were a woman, it would have been better to be a man; if you were Catholic, it would have been a lot easier to be Protestant; if you were from the North, it was much easier to be from the South; if you were Irish, it was much easier to be English. So it was like everything that I was was wrong; everything that I was was hard, difficult, and a punishment.” (Sered) Biography. Medbh (pronounced “Maeve”) McGuckian is a poet born on August 12, 1950 into a Catholic family in Belfast, Northern Ireland. As a northern Irish, Catholic woman, McGuckian dealt with severe social, political, and religious tensions. McGuckian is the third of six children. Her father worked as the headmaster of a school and as a farmer, and her artistic mother served as an early influence on McGuckian. For her secondary- school education, she attended a Dominican convent, where she came to the conclusion that she wanted to be a poet. She went on to attend Queen’s University, Belfast in 1968. There, she studied English, met and took classes from Seamus Heaney, and received her B.A. in 1972. McGuckian continued her education and did post-graduate work in the English department of Queen’s University until 1974 when she received an M.A. During that time, she began to write for local papers and magazines. One of her poems was first published in 1975. After graduation, she went back to her secondary-school to teach English. She also taught at St. Patrick’s Boys’ College in East Belfast. In 1977, she married John McGuckian, also a teacher. They have three sons and one daughter and currently reside in Belfast. The Flower Master and Other Poems, 1993. Since the publication of her first volume of poetry, The Flower Master in 1982, she has written numerous collections. She became the first woman to be named writer-in-residence at Queen’s University in 1986, and has received many other honors as well. McGuckian uses a rich, lyrical style and well-defined grammatical structure to hold together her mysterious feminine imagery. Although McGuckian’s poetry focuses on many subjects common to the female experience, it is written in a voice so undeniably private that it is almost impossible to gain an understanding of her personal experiences with femininity and motherhood. McGuckian’s secrecy serves both as a protective barrier for her and as a seduction of the reader. Commenting on poetry, she writes, “I feel that you’re going public – by writing the poem you’re becoming a whore. You’re selling your soul which is worse than prostitution – in a sense you’re vilifying your mind. I do feel that must be undertaken with the greatest possible fastidiousness.” (Wills 63) Themes. Most of the themes and issues that McGuckian addresses in her poetry are typically feminine. She is generally read “as a poet obsessively concerned with femininity, with her personal life, even with the dimensions of her house, to the exclusion of wider, more public concerns” (Wills 61). Her poetry is full of images of nature and the home, such as the moon, flowers, water, house, pregnancy, and birth; and in many of her poems, nature is representative of the feminine unconscious. It is also important to note that she only indirectly describes the body by using these symbols. For example, McGuckian typically uses the home as the metaphorical equivalent for a woman’s body. Similarly, she also concerns herself with a woman’s shape, her function as a container for a child, and the subsequent “fragmentation of the woman’s body” (Wills 63). This is exemplified in her poem, “Marconi’s Cottage.” Another primary theme in McGuckian’s poetry is familial relationships. These take the form of both the maternal relationship between mother and child and the sexual relationship between husband and wife. Describing her poetry, McGuckian says: “It’s like embroidery. It’s very feminine, I guess. They are very intricate, my poems, a weaving of patterns of in’s and out’s and contradictions, one thing playing off another” (Wilson 19). Mother Ireland. McGuckian is not an ordinary Northern Irish poet. She does not clearly address the social or political circumstances of her region; what references she does make to the Catholic or nationalist image of Ireland are veiled and obscure. In fact, she undercuts the archetypal, nationalist myth of Mother Ireland by turning this public image into a private discourse about her body. In her poems “The Heiress” and “The Soil Map,” McGuckian creates a tension between politics and her personal, feminine experience. McGuckian identifies woman with the land, yet does not reduce her to the common Mother Ireland. It is also characteristic of her to imagine the body as a place of struggle, and, oddly, the mother as an alien figure: “Rather than representing the continuity of generations, maternity for McGuckian is associated with historical discontinuity, bodily disruption, and loss” (Wills 161). Like many Irish contemporaries, she expresses her strong feelings of both love and hatred towards Ireland. On this subject, McGuckian says in a 1988 interview, “I don’t think anyone can really be Irish in Ireland. It is such a dreadful place. It’s blood-sucked, you feel like you’re walking in blood” (Wilson 21). The Collections. McGuckian’s first poetry collections, The Flower Master (1982) and Venus and the Rain (1984), concentrate on familial relationships. Although both collections are full of images of reproduction, McGuckian approaches the subject with antithetical emotions in each volume. The Flower Master , filled with images of death, focuses on a disillusionment with bearing children. This depression is contrasted with the feelings of expectation and joy that are found in Venus and the Rain . Here, the predominant images are of growth, newness, and the mystery of womanhood. In this collection, McGuckian uses the idea of pregnancy on a dual level: the speaker can be seen as being pregnant with child or with the idea of a poem. In McGuckian’s third collection, On Ballycastle Beach (1988), she explores the inner life of a woman within her body and home, and also a woman’s relationship with her children and husband/lover figure. These relationships are associated with violence and loss, in contrast to the purity and wholeness that one might stereotypically connect with the maternal image (Wills 182). Her language is extremely emotional and personal. Marconi’s Cottage (1991) is a collection of McGuckian’s most mysterious poems in which she even invokes the presence of a Muse. It centers on the value of poetry itself and is broken down into three parts. The first appears to focus on the conflict between two opposing types of fertility: motherhood and artistic creativity. The second section celebrates the birth of a daughter, and the third represents a realization that both types of creation (birth and poetry) are worthy of celebration. Captain Lavender (1995), represents a slight shift in focus away from the feminine. This collection is divided into two parts. The first poems attempt to deal with her father’s death, and the second half of the collection is an articulation of her experiences teaching a writing workshop to republican and loyalist prisoners at the Maze prison. Works By The Author. McGuckian, Medbh. Blaris Moor . County Meath: Gallery Press, 2015. —. The Book of the Angel. County Meath: Gallery Press, 2004. —. Captain Lavender . Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 1995. —. The Currach Requires No Harbours . Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 2010. —. Drawing Ballerinas. County Meath: Gallery Press, 2001. —. The Face of the Earth. County Meath: Gallery Press, 2002. —. The Flower Master . New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, reprinted as The Flower Master and Other Poems , Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1993. —. The Greenhouse . Oxford: Steane, c. 1983. —. The High Caul Cap : County Meath: Gallery Press, 2012. —. Marconi’s Cottage . Oldcastle: Gallery, 1991. —. On Ballycastle Beach . New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, reprinted, Oldcastle: Gallery, 1995. —. Portrait of Joanna (chapbook). Belfast: Ulsterman, 1980. —. Selected Poems . Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 1997. —. Shelmalier . Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 1998. —. Single Ladies: Sixteen Poems (chapbook). Buldeigh Salterton: Interim Press, 1980. —. With Damian Gorman and Douglas Marshall. Trio Poetry . Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1981. —. Venus and the Rain. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Awards. National Poetry Competition prize, 1979, for “The Flitting” Eric Gregory award, 1980 Rooney prize, 1982 Ireland Arts Council award, 1982 Alice Hunt Bartlett award, 1983, for The Flower Master Cheltenham Literature Festival Poetry Competition prize, 1989 Forward Poetry Prize, 2002. Marconi's Cottage by Medbh McGuckian. About halfway through her new American collection, Irish poet Medbh McGuckian invokes the navel of the dream, the constant Freud used in The Interpretation of Dreams to balance his equation of waking life and the irrational: I have had cloud ravenous upon me as the mountain in its wearing away, just before the dazzlement of the later moonlight, charred as if off water, corrupted sea-water, or Rhine-foam. And here, beneath my foot, the dream’s navel, a kind of central year holding always by the heart the close power of the dust, the many uses of earth. These remaining places, how are they to be prepared for us, the too-travelled path to word-house completeness? (“Fourteenth Century Hours of the Virgin,” 77) One hallmark of her style is a subliminally untoward syntax—it would be less ambiguous to have another as in either the first or second line of that quotation, for example; and does that last line refer to us, they, or something else altogether? Other standard feints include the eclipsed subject, non-standard compounds (“word-house” as above, but also “rainwalls” and “subwoods”) unconventional physical associations (“all I see are the living,/being pulled into full existence,/emerging as if from a cellar”) and cummingsesque mappings of qualities onto qualities (“Skywarm roads mix obsessions and withholdings/like a marriage of already lived years”). Wake Forest University Press, which specializes in contemporary Irish poetry, lists six titles by McGuckian: 1988’s On Ballycastle Beach, Marconi’s Cottage (1992), Captain Lavender (1995), Selected Poems (1997), Shelmalier (1999), and The Soldiers of Year II. McGuckian is on my very short list of poets whose books I buy as soon as I’m aware they’re in print; somehow the selected slipped my radar, and along the way I misplaced my copy of Marconi’s Cottage. Despite the considerable efforts of Wake Forest UP, I find myself at an epistemological impasse when it comes to the poetry of other countries, especially that of Ireland—if I had to rely only on gatekeepers and kingmakers for my sense of what is possible and who’s finding it in the poetry of my own conflicted, loveable country, I would be a much closer follower of professional sports than I am. So it follows (or I imagine it does) that poetry written by those who hold other passports is not merely proposing that I find the emergency in it despite barriers of cultural and linguistic difference, but also that to get it I will have to throw myself on the mercy of a literary politics I’ve only been able to observe from a distance. Disclaimers and hesitations don’t survive opening a McGuckian book at random: I have experienced a wilderness printed black on white. Tarnished years of silver fever. All my minds are weapons. I miss the tunic of rain that settled in like an old heart complaint, the polluted air so bracing, the great non-meetings wrapped up in politics. (“Life as a Literary Convict”, SYII, 18) While I’m impatient with the switcheroo of a wilderness being printed, unaware of what silver fever feels like at all let alone when it goes on for years, and predisposed to fear any construction that acknowledges the plurality of unity, I am taken in by that first stanza, by the charged flatness of its last word— call it hypnotism, or displacement, or mild intoxication. Intoxicated, I’m available to be tugged along by the very simple emotional gesture of missing something. But what? “Tunic of rain” gets both the feeling of wearing a soaking cloak and the sight of a gust of wind blowing through a downpour. The confusion in the rest of the stanza is apt—why miss something that’s like heart disease? (The familiarity of the jailer.) If the air’s not fresh, at least it’s cold. If no progress was made, at least there was the excitement of taking a side. These lines work through the prospect of peace after an unconscionably long hostility. And again, an unremarkable and unexpected word closes the stanza. The following stanzas have similarly imploded endings— cellar, childhood, cost, republicans, and the spectacular last stanza, describing what I’m guessing is the corpse of a British soldier killed in Northern Ireland: He lies in his English envelope like the Greek word for Greekness, defender of Throne and Altar, while the frontier is guarded by the small wombs of two chickens. (SYII, 19) I don’t know whether she literally means oviducts, or that farmland is already taking back militarized zones, or whether she’s signalling that she’s dreaming the end of the troubles. McGuckian’s gestural poetics seduce the reader into multiple readings just to get enough sense of what gives such strong feelings. Definitive interpretations are less likely to occur than parallel experiences for even the most assiduous reader. This dreamy quality recalls the muted surrealism of Rene Char and Robert Desnos, whose introspection and wounded politics bear similarity to Yeats’s, or Rilke’s even. To tag McGuckian with any kind of experimentalist label, though, is to put in the background the irritable, fundamentally sexy reaching after meaning that her poems provoke. Medbh McGuckian. Born on August 12, 1950 in Belfast, Medbh McGuckian started writing poetry as a young child and wrote often in adolescence. She attended Queen's University in Belfast, where she befriended poets Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson and Seamus Heaney, and earned her BA and MA in English. Her first publications, Single Ladies: Sixteen Poems and Portrait of Joanna , appeared in pamphlets by Interim Press in 1980. McGuckian proceeded to work on several collaborative projects, and her first major collection, The Flower Master , was published in 1982. McGuckian's publications in the U.S. include On Ballycastle Beach (1988), Marconi's Cottage (1992), Captain Lavender (1995), Shelmalier (1998), The Soliders of the Year II (2002), The Book of the Angel (2004), The Currach Requires no Harbours (2007), and My Love Has Fared Inland (2010), all by Wake Forest University Press. A volume of McGuckian's selected poems was published in 1997. She has won numerous awards, including an Ireland Arts Council Award, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Cheltenham Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize. She was also the first woman to hold the Writer-in-Residence position at Queen's University. McGuckian currently lives in Belfast with her husband and children, and is a professor of English at Queen's University.