Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian

Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem

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 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 silences are read as a response to the precarious positionality of poet and speaker at the site of “disaster” and the limits of articulacy. In line with Rukeyser’s notion of the life of poetry, the life of McGuckian's silences is located, Fadem argues, in the poems’ production, as revealed self-reflexively, and in their prolonged consumption. This oeuvre operates as a formidable counter-discourse by converting poetry's reception into a much protracted task that redistributes the temporal economy of poem and reader and disrupts the given structures of time, place, and the order of things.

Lexington Books

Pages: 310 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-7936-0706-5 • Hardback • December 2019 • $115.00 • (£75.00)

978-1-7936-0707-2 • eBook • December 2019 • $109.00 • (£70.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian

Hardback

Summary

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 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 silences are read as a response to the precarious positionality of poet and speaker at the site of “disaster” and the limits of articulacy. In line with Rukeyser’s notion of the life of poetry, the life of McGuckian's silences is located, Fadem argues, in the poems’ production, as revealed self-reflexively, and in their prolonged consumption. This oeuvre operates as a formidable counter-discourse by converting poetry's reception into a much protracted task that redistributes the temporal economy of poem and reader and disrupts the given structures of time, place, and the order of things.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 310 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-7936-0706-5 • Hardback • December 2019 • $115.00 • (£75.00)

978-1-7936-0707-2 • eBook • December 2019 • $109.00 • (£70.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

Author

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

Table of Contents

Foreword: 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

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 McGuckian will be a landmark study of McGuckian’s oeuvre. The most critical intervention made by the 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

Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian

Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem

Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian

ALSO AVAILABLE