Description
Book SynopsisSilence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian is an innovative contribution to the scholarship on Belfast poet, Medbh McGuckian. This book considers the entire oeuvre of this globally respected Irish woman writer, a member of the contemporary avant-garde with now fifteen (U.S. published) volumes and numerous individual publications. The author positions McGuckian’s oeuvre as political and historical poetry and offers a provocative new assessment of its crafted silences. This work argues that it is the muted character of McGuckian’s poems—a consequence of a defamiliarized language, the overwhelming sway of the image, and a profusion of intertextual quoting—that constitutes their agency and force. The sciences are read as a response to the precarious positionality of poet and speaker at the site of “disaster” and the limits of articulacy. This book argues, in line with Rukeyser’s notion of the life of poetry, the life of silenceis located in the poems’ production, as revealed and embodied self-reflexively, and the exponential prolonging of its consumption. This oeuvre, in its public reception, operates as a formidable counter-discourse by converting the reading into a much protracted task that redistributes the temporal economy of poetry and disrupts given, everyday structures of time, place, and the order of things.
Trade ReviewA breakthrough study, which combines a fine alertness to the local intensities of McGuckian's form and style with a sure understanding of the wider social forces out of which her works spring. This is a luminous, original analysis by a scholar who has the gift of explanation rather than simplification. -- Declan Kiberd, University of Notre Dame
Remarkable, revisionary, and beautifully written, Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian will be a landmark study of McGuckian’s oeuvre. A critical intervention made by this book is to place in perspective—hopefully for good—the debates about McGuckian’s intertextuality and to integrate that practice with the concerns structuring her work: trauma, silence and dispossession. -- David Lloyd, University of California, Riverside
Table of ContentsForeword: Reckoning With (Women’s) Silence(s): The Work of Poetry Chapter 1: Home Is Where the Border Is: The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian Introduction, Part I: Poetics of Silence: Language, Image, Voice Chapter 2: Silence | Speaking: The Secret-Spoken Language of Partition Chapter 3: Text | Image: Ut pictura poïesis Chapter 4: Textuality | Intertextuality: Embedded Contingencies and the Tyranny of (Postcolonial) Comparativity Introduction, Part II: Economies of Speaking: Production, Consumption, Conjuring Chapter 5: Poïesis | Poïema: “Deep in your snow”: Coming to Be Located Chapter 6: Privated | Worlded: “Absolutely not hermetic”: Iterations of Silence and the Borders of Articulacy Afterword: History | Prosody: The Poet as Conjure Artist
