Medbh McGuckian
Born Maeve McCaughan in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the third of six children. Begins her education at Holy Family Primary School, where her father is the Vice Principal.
Attends Dominican Convent, Fortwilliam, for college (high school). Considers a religious life, but decides "not to be a nun but a poet."
MM on her loss of a religious vocation:
I remember going to a poetry reading in Belfast, I was about sixteen, and around that time—1966—Heaney's Death of a Naturalist came out, and I was amazed that somebody from Derry could be an acclaimed poet. The poetry reading was like a secret society meeting—no other woman in the room—and I remember this feeling of "I am here," like going to Mass. I decided that the second-best thing to becoming a priest would be to become a poet. This is something I can do even though it is nearly as difficult, but it is not actually unlawful. So it was only when I went to Queens and Heaney was teaching there – in my final year, '72, I had him in a seminar, and he was just a wonderful mediatrix.
McGuckian, Medbh, and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. “Comhra, with a Foreword and Afterword by Laura O’Connor.” Southern Review, vol. 31, no. 3, Summer 1995, p. 581-614.
Attends Queen's U, Belfast, where she studies English.
Takes Heaney for a seminar; joins his poetry circle, which includes Paul Muldoon. She will later say of Heaney, "He was the first person who didn’t make me feel that poetry was a closed shop. I got up the courage to say that I would like to be a poet, and although I hadn’t yet put pen to paper he invited me to the group and Paul Muldoon was there. There was this openness and friendliness that I trusted.”
McGuckian and Ni Dhomhnaill
She adopts the Irish "Medbh" when Heaney signs his books to her that way.
Begins graduate work at Queens U, and is writing for local newspapers and magazines.
Takes a job teaching English at St. Patrick's College, Knock.
Her first poem, "Marriage," is published by The Honest Ulsterman.
Marries a John McGuckian, a geography teacher at St. Patrick's and continues to write poetry.
Her poem "The Flitting" wins the National Poetry Competition. MM submitted under a pseudonym, "Jean Fisher." Borbála Faragó tells the story:
In 1979, Jean Fisher won the National Poetry Competition Prize with three submitted poems, “The Flitting,” “Tulips,” and “McGregor’s Garden.” The prize money was £1,000, and since this was a well-publicized, important national competition, the media went to the house of Jean Fisher to broadcast the event. When they arrived, six-month-pregnant Medbh McGuckian, a Catholic schoolteacher and housewife from Belfast, opened the door and let them know she was Jean Fisher. Soon after this interview the competition authority decided to redistribute the prize money, and gave McGuckian only half of the original amount.
Faragó, Borbála. Medbh McGuckian. Contemporary Irish Writers Series, Bucknell UP, 2014, p. 4.
MM publishes two chapbooks, Single Ladies: Sixteen Poems, and Portrait of Joanna. Unlike the Northern Irish poets who came before her, she does not initially address the political situation in Northern Ireland or mention the Troubles. Her poetry, which has been compared to Emily Dickinson's, is more private and detached.
MM gives birth to Liam, first of her four children.
MM struggles with a breakdown after the birth:
Well, you see the birth itself was absolutely inhumane. Everything exploded and erupted: my relationship with my father and mother, my husband, and with the Church . . . my unresolved moral thing with sexuality. For six weeks I didn't sleep, and my whole body seemed to be weeping with liquid from every orifice. The whole body was just seared and opened and the mind was as well. I was totally confused. I had these Virgin Mary hallucinations, and I heard celestial music and voices out of the radio. My father and my husband were very understanding about the whole thing. I was put into a mental home for three or four weeks, and I had the baby taken away from me. I went absolutely bananas. I was on all sorts of drugs and things. I was told not to write poetry and told I would never write poetry again."
Do you think that the person that came out was more the real you--the poet you?
Well, whether it was more the real me, it certainly was the poet. I felt I had . . . something to offer, I had some truth. At the lowest point I was lying in my mother's house and I thought, "I'm going to die. I am really going to die here. My head is so . . . I'm crazy." Still, some part of my mind was able to watch the rest of the mind. I was just so distressed. I decided I would try to compose myself for a sleep, and maybe I would sleep and get away from this awful thing. Suddenly my whole body . . . suddenly without wanting it the hands went like this . . . went into this attitude of prayer. And yet at the same time, my whole body seemed to open up in orgasm. At one point I relived the whole twelve hour birth process, the breathing and the baby coming out. And at this moment I felt an absolute conviction that birth, death, and orgasm were all exactly the same sensation. I felt that . . . other people have explained this. Poetry is full of this.
McGuckian and Ni Dhomhnaill
The Flower Master, her first full-length collection, appears, published by Oxford. It receives critical accolades, receiving a Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and an Arts Council Ireland Award in 1982 and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award in 1983. Her work is included in Contemporary British Poetry, an anthology edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion.
Venus and the Rain is published. In this volume she writes about her breakdown. She says, "Venus in the Rain, which nobody has ever liked, was all about that time."
On Ballycastle Beach published.
Wins the Cheltenham Prize for On Ballycastle Beach.
Marconi's Cottage is short-listed for the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Irish Literary Prize.
MM wins the Bass Ireland Award for Literature, and is awarded a visiting fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley.
MM is named Writer in Residence at Queen's University, Belfast. She is the first woman to hold the position.
Selected Poems is published. In a review of it, 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."
Shelmalier is published. The poems in it take a decidedly political turn. In an interview with The Kenyon Review, MM said of it:
Shelmalier is an Anglicization of the Irish phrase "Siol Malure," which is the seed, the people, the race, the tribe. I knew the word "Shelmalier" from hearing the songs "Boolavogue," and "Kelly, the Boy from Killane." During the Victorian and famine years of the nineteenth century, the truth of what happened to the Irish went into the songs. Those songs are very emotive. They still cannot be sung certain places. "Kelly, the Boy from Killane" is a song that, until studying the Rebellion, I always thought was faintly comic, a drunken song at somebody's party, a rabble-rousing, mock heroic – but no, it's not mock heroic.
The fellow was really a hero. The Presbyterians of the North led the rebellion against the British. In 1798 Protestants fought alongside Catholics. To write a poem for a Protestant hero, as I do in "Shelmalier," was very liberating for me, took me out of my own bigotry. It also made me realize even more how damaging British influence has been here. Instead of trying to let the people cohabit the country, the British have been able to maintain rule by separating them. Even as we speak they are spending thirty thousand pounds building a wall right behind my house to divide the Catholics and Protestants.
This explanation causes more problems of interpretation than it solves. Shelmalier is actually an area in County Wexford. In Irish it's actually Síol Maoluír, meaning "the Seed of Moilir." Boolavogue is a village in County Wexford. The ballad with that name commemorates the 1798 rebellion through the story of the local parish priest, Father John Murphy, who led his parishioners into the United Irishmen Rebellion. These rebels from Wexford were eventually defeated at the Battle of Vinegar Hill, a little over a month arfter they joined the cause. After that battle, the rebel leaders were all executed, but Murphy's was particularly brutal: he was hanged, then his body was decapitated. His body was then burnt in a barrel of tar, while his head was placed on a spike to warn potential rebels about the cost of fighting the British.
But the root of this interpretive problem is in the very nature of McGuckian's writing. She pitches this poem as something that is at least tangentially connected to an actual historical event. However, her "Author's Note" to the volume qualifies that severely:
I owe the idea of this book to Jane Leonard, of the Ulster Museum, who suggested I should read up on the 1798 Rebellion with a view to writing a poem about it. I also owe a huge further debt to the new wave of researchers who have given us this centenary's version of what happened then. I found that what I had written in the form of epitaph and commemoration or address for the present day disturbances in the North fitted like an egg into its shell that previous whirlwind moment when, unbelievably, hope and history did in fact rhyme. So the Victorian 'Shelmalier' with its beautiful coalescence of Irish and English, its sense of a lost and all but forgotten tribe, its being both a placename for a barony in Wexford and a battalion of seabird hunters, seemed an evocative title. The theme is less the experienced despair of a noble struggle brutally quenched than the dawn of my own enlightenment after a medieval ignorance, my being suddenly able to welcome into consciousness figures of an integrity I had never learned to be proud of.
What starts out looking like something you can pry open, with connections to the United Irishmen rebellion, the Protestant/Catholic division in Northern Ireland, and even Heaney's "Requiem for the Croppies" (notice MM's allusion to Heaney's lines from a chorus in The Cure at Troy) in her Author's Note), instead pivots into her own coming to awareness. It's not solipsism, but I can see why critics claim that she is focused primarily on her own inner world.
Morris, Sawnie, and Medbh McGuckian. "Under the North Window: An Interview with Medbh McGuckian." The Kenyon Review, New Series, vol. 23, no. 3/4 (Summer-Autumn, 2001), pp. 64-74.
Awarded the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem) for her poem "She is in the Past, She Has This Grace."
The Currach Requires No Harbours is shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now prize.
The High Caul Cap is published by Gallery Press in County Meath. In it MM invokes the caul, once preserved above hearths as a charm against drowning and an enduring potent symbol and material reminder of the birth-bond.
Blaris Moor is published. The collection springboards off of the traditional popular ballad that commemorates the trial, conviction and execution of four militiamen in 1797.
Love, the Magician is published.
Selected Poems 1978-1994 is published.