Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian

(Hardback)

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Silence 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 McGuckians 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 McGuckians poemsa consequence of a defamiliarized language, the overwhelming sway of the image, and a profusion of intertextual quotingthat 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 Rukeysers 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, operatesas 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.

Reviews

A 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 McGuckianwill be a landmark study of McGuckians oeuvre. Acriticalintervention made by this bookis to place in perspectivehopefully for goodthe debates about McGuckians intertextuality andto integrate that practice with the concerns structuring her work: trauma, silence and dispossession. -- David Lloyd, University of California, Riverside

Author Bio

Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem is associate professor of English at the City University of New York, Kingsborough.