Medbh McGuckian: A Threader of Double-Stranded Words (2024)

Shane Alcobia-Murphy

The poetry of Medbh McGuckian has by no means received universal critical acclaim and many of her reviewers have been notoriously acerbic and personal in their attacks. Patrick Williams classifies her work as ‘colourful guff’: ‘McGuckian's concoctions of endless poeticism are non-visionary, and the funny, sealed little worlds where harmless cranks parley with themselves in gobbledegook won't impinge on the real world of loot and dragons.’1 Such criticism of her work's supposedly vexatious obliquity is not unusual: she is labelled fey and mannered,2 whimsical,3 at best intricate and enigmatic, at worst inaccessible and subjective.4 Gerald Dawe complains that much of her imagery is ‘imprecise to a fault and, like candy floss, rather bland a second time round’;5 Mary O'Donnell believes that her ‘literary “autism”’6 is an Art for Art's sake; and Andrew Elliott is tempted to view her poetry as ‘the powerfully rehabilitated feminine icon co-opted by the morality of monetarism into a meaningless “folly-studded” aesthetic’.7 Behind the indignation of these critics lie three essential objections: first, that her work is deliberately obfuscatory; secondly, that she has imperfectly absorbed the influence of both literary peers and precursors;8 and thirdly, that her poems lack coherent subject matter.9 All three are reductive misreadings of McGuckian's oeuvre. This chapter offers a corrective account by redirecting critical atttention towards her peculiar method of composition, focusing especially on her hitherto unnoticed strategies of quotation.

There is some truth, however, in the accusation that her work ‘hoards knowledge that belongs exclusively to the poet's private life’.10 Indeed, McGuckian admits as much in her interview with Kathleen McCracken when, describing her poems, she states ‘I'm not sure they don't remain private, at least until some scholar totally identifies with me. When I read one, I know who it is for, what I felt, what they felt. […] But there's usually one special person the poem is a private message to.’11 Three examples spring readily to mind: ‘Spy Fever’12 is written specifically to commemorate the birthday of a poet at Princeton, its title deriving from a letter sent by him;13 ‘The Sun Trap’ (FM 24) is based on early love-letters sent to her, from which she quotes liberally;14 and the content of ‘Dear Rain’ (MC 22–23) is due in part to correspondence with Paul Durcan.15 A degree of privacy especially pertains to those literary pastiches of hers which employ intertextual allusions as in-jokes. For example, McGuckian informs me that ‘Ales Stenar’16 ostensibly refers to ‘a sort of Stonehenge near Lund. There is a man there called Lars who has translated Heaney and Muldoon and they had also written about the stones.’17 The published version not only shields ‘Lars’ from the public with the abbreviated dedication ‘To L. H. S.’, it also obliquely refers to the group of Irish poets who attended the poets' convention held at Ales Stenar in 1990. The first draft, included among her papers at Emory University, is written on the back of the ‘Programme of Events’ and is described as ‘a pastiche of Seamus Heaney’.18 Lines such as ‘I felt the thickness of this line / Like the proximity of dawn’ and ‘A torness rooted in the curve of what's there’ are excellent examples of well-intentioned imitation: reminiscent of Heaney, they are inflected humorously by McGuckian's own inimitable use of simile. Once the in-joke is known, then the opening lines ‘In a moment that was coming to think of itself / As post-everything’ is transformed from being an expression of heartfelt existential angst to a clever dig at the vacuous pretentiousness of certain conferences, with the ‘six poets’ who ‘contradicted each other, / searching the soul of the sea / for the death of grace’ being the target of her displeasure.

Even if the primary addressee is named, a poem's personal message may not be immediately accessible and the poem-as-communiqué may remain oblique. ‘Unused Water’ (CL 28), dedicated to Joan McBreen,19 is one such poem. Though evocative and imagistic, the opening verse's relation to McBreen is uncertain: ‘Lost earrings, / a dash of acrid green / in the wrong time of the year’. The title, the poet explains, is suggestive of the amniotic fluid which, although present, is not of use to McBreen who has just undergone a hysterectomy.20 The ‘lost earrings’ refer both to the actual earrings left behind during a visit, and to the non-functioning ovaries. In a surgical context, ‘acrid’ is an apt description of the earrings' colour, counteracting the normally fertile connotations of ‘green’. Without being privy to the poet's intentions, a reader would miss this primary level of signification. However, this is not to say that the reader's response is unduly curtailed: by being receptive to the colour symbolism (green, darkness) and the contrast between water and dryness, he would still be able to focus on the main theme of an apparent loss and ultimate regaining of fertility.

This argument becomes clearer if one looks at ‘Lines for Thanksgiving’ (CL 13), the opening poem of her fifth collection. McGuckian revealed in an interview that the primary intention when writing the text was to refer both to her summer residence, Marconi's Cottage (Ballycastle), and to Gallery Press, the publishing house which took control of her work once Oxford University Press turned down her fourth collection (entitled Marconi's Cottage). The poem ‘is a goodbye to Marconi's Cottage. It is all about Marconi's Cottage. It was written for Peter [Fallon], and it just describes the cottage, and thanking him for giving me the book – it was like the book was the house itself’.21 Perhaps the somewhat acrimonious circ*mstances surrounding her change of publisher determined that the autobiographical details be alluded to obliquely, thus necessitating a stratagem not entirely unfamiliar in her poetry: ‘Every poem I've written is about something that's happened to me … but I have coded it.’22 During the summer of 1991, negotiations became fraught between McGuckian and her commissioning editor at Oxford University Press, Jacqueline Simms. Oxford University Press (OUP) were unwilling to bring out her new collection, but had offered to publish a Selected Poems which would incorporate some of the new poems. Peter Fallon, the editor of Gallery Press, indicated a desire to publish her forthcoming work, but also wished to bring out revised editions of her first three collections. OUP then felt compelled to set restrictive conditions for the proposed publication of her Selected Poems: first, she would have to guarantee that her first three books would not be reprinted by another publisher during the lifetime of the Selected Poems; secondly, a clause would have to be included in the OUP contract that would rule out the publication of any rival Selected Poems; and thirdly, she would have to make it clear to Gallery Press that she has accepted the terms as set out by OUP.23 These prerequisites were unacceptable to McGuckian, so the publication was cancelled and rights for her existing collections were subsequently reassigned to her.

The reader of ‘Lines for Thanksgiving’ would be hard-pressed to find such a narrative, but two details are highly suggestive: firstly, the title refers to, and gives thanks for, her first appearance as a Gallery Press poet (Marconi's Cottage was published on Thanksgiving Day, 28 November 1991); and secondly, while the religious connotation of ‘monstrance’ in the third stanza is perfectly apt, it also has the more obscure meaning of monstrance du droit, ‘a writ issuing out of Chancery, for restoring a person to lands or tenements legally belonging to him, though found in possession of another lately deceased’ (Oxford English Dictionary), thus alluding to the restoration of copyright to McGuckian for her first three collections. As with ‘Unused Water’, the poem is necessarily oblique since its sensitive context is to be shielded from the wider public. However, the text's meaning is not confined to the poet's primary intention. Indeed, her blunt statement of intent does scant justice to the multivalent strands of imagery running through the poem's corpus and it is evident from its sinuous narrative progression that the primary impulse has receded into the background:

Talking to the poet about the labyrinthine complexity of her similes, Cecile Gray makes the astute observation that ‘[i]t's as if you take the image and push it to its uttermost. It's as if, maybe, the image goes beyond the initial experience and begins to weave itself out in more than one direction at once …’24 The ambiguity surrounding the uncertain terms of comparison in this opening stanza is productive, throwing up surprising juxtapositions and forcing the reader to explore multiple avenues of thought. What, one might ask, is ‘interwoven like the materials for a nest’ – the ‘old wall’, the ‘Two floors’, or both? The images themselves (floors, staircase, wall, slates) may suggest an actual building, yet one is equally aware that the poet is referring to something other than that which is physically manifest. In what way can an invisible staircase crouch ‘muscularly’? Much of the uncertainty is due to McGuckian's propitious use of imagery whereby the physical, textual and spiritual are so closely intertwined. An overly literal reading fails to account for the tension established between the acute sense of enclosure (‘crouching’, ‘airtight’) and the evocation of a temporal space between ‘calvary’ and ‘crib’. This tension is compounded by the distance implied between the two antithetical sides of the poet's consciousness: ‘the woman born in my sleep’ / ‘the stranger me’. The house in the first instance becomes synonymous with the poet's lifeline, the distance between the two ‘floors’ being a metaphorical description of McGuckian's awareness of her own mortality; in the second instance, the two-storey house is emblematic of the split between her conscious and dream selves. But what is the reader to make of the religious register of her language (thanksgiving, calvary, crib, gracefully, saint, eternally, monstrance)? Within the context of Captain Lavender, one could tentatively suggest that it is occasioned by the impending death of her father, and that she is investigating the consolations of her Catholic upbringing. However, one could equally surmise that the poet herself is adopting the role of a priest,25 the house figuring as her poem/prayer. Indeed, speaking to Catherine Byron, the poet explained that, in general, the house ‘is probably the poem itself […] or a symbol for the world of the poem’.26

McGuckian's poetry is oblique for a more fundamental reason than her use of either literary pastiche or encoded missives: she occludes her idiosyncratic relationship to literary exemplars. In interviews she states that ‘the poetic process is a vatic one’ whereby the poet becomes ‘possessed’;27 passively subjugating her will to the ‘creative force’, she regards her profession as having ‘a priest-like function, it's one of just being a window, and you are nothing – you yourself are something that is seen through’.28 Although this may well be the ideal, the method of composition is decidedly more architectonic:

Where does she find these words and are the sources significant? Are the fragments randomly listed? Although she never records her sources and rarely acknowledges her borrowings in her published work, a detailed analysis of her word lists and early drafts in her notebooks30 and unbound work-sheets31 confirms that the ‘collections of words’ result from her reading of diverse texts. One reviewer, Catriona O'Reilly, came unwittingly close to this conclusion: ‘McGuckian's intense, improvisatory movement’, she states, ‘owes much to Marina Tsvetaeva, and there is in general a considerable debt to her sources, in particular to Mandelstam and the Celan of Mohn und Gedächtnis. Such influences contribute to the work's slightly dislocated quality, many poems reading like translations from the Russian.’32 What O'Reilly did not realise is that McGuckian's poems borrow wholesale from the translations themselves; the authors (and translators) are her muses. The ‘collection of words’ is meticulously recorded from biographies, memoirs, critical essays, etc., and are subsequently arranged into poetic texts. Realising this, the next stage is to trace the sources and to see if they open up any new readings.

Two worksheets, comprising 85 phrases written in columnar form, act as the basis for ‘Lines for Thanksgiving’33 since 26 of the phrases are used to make up the poem. One of the foreshortened phrases – ‘a past that had almost sunk into the ground, lying by the water's edge like an idler taking the air’ – eventually brought to mind the intertext which McGuckian was using, namely Proust's Swann's Way.34 Comparing the two – Proust on the left, McGuckian on the right – one can gauge the extent to which the poem is a bricolage of quotations taken from the first volume of In Search of Lost Time:

The opening five lines are made up from eight modified quotations from Swann's Way, juxtaposed to depict a single, enclosed and homely space. Describing this location in animistic fashion – dormant yet alive, it is ‘crouching muscularly’ – McGuckian is influenced by a Proustian manner of perception. Thus, the architecture's solidity is illusory, its identity subject to change and not as ‘airtight’ as it first appears. Describing the body's confusion upon awakening and its attempt to deduce its location, Proust's narrator states: ‘Its memory, the composite of its ribs, its knees, its shoulder-blades, offered it a series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept, while the unseen walls, shifting and adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirled round it in the dark’ (4–5). The awakening body carries within it, and calls to mind, the memories of all the rooms it has ever slept in. For McGuckian, the poet (and the body of the poem) carries within the texts which she has read. Fragments from Proust's narrative are ‘interwoven like the materials for a nest’, thereby confirming what she had said in interview about using the ‘collection of words’: it is ‘like a bird building a nest’. Crucially, the citation is taken from a passage describing the making of the narrator's aunt's tea: ‘The leaves, having lost or altered their original appearance, resembled the most disparate things, the transparent wing of a fly, the blank side of a label, the petal of a rose, which had all been piled together, pounded or interwoven like the materials for a nest’ (60). Like these leaves, the quotations are transformed and seem disparate when transplanted from the original text, yet they reform to create something new and unified. The intertext is here more significant, however, as the tea's perfume is what triggers the narrator's remembrance of things past and allows him to recover time past:

Where Proust is referring to the way in which the narrator is able to recall the events prior to his birth, McGuckian is talking about quite a different form of speaking between ‘one town to another’, yet she too is moving backwards in time (from ‘calvary to crib’). Her opening line cites an idea formed by Proust's narrator that ‘all Combray had consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase’. McGuckian is not simply concerned here with location: the phrases taken to make up her poem all come from the chapter entitled ‘Combray’, and so for her it is the text which is being considered architectonically. Her poem, then, can be considered as a self-reflexive meditation on art, the inspiration behind it and the way it incorporates a dialogue between the author and her precursor.

McGuckian's reading of Proust is succeeded by a reading of the fragments she has assembled from his text. Repeating that ‘double-journey’ – a journey undertaken both by Proust's narrator and the poet – when constructing her text, she feels as if a new self has been created. In Swann's Way, the ‘woman born in my sleep’ is a dream self: in one respect, she is ‘the girl of my dream’ (3), an erotic Other; yet she is also inherently himself, a product of his own subconscious. For McGuckian, the use of another author's words seems to create a rift between the supposedly self-identical lyrical ‘I’ whereby the poet speaks directly in her work, and the ‘I’ who is not McGuckian but a ‘woman born in my sleep’. To use Rimbaud's words, ‘Je est un autre’. The ‘I’ is neither McGuckian nor Proust. Everything in the text is in tension and occupies a liminal position: the staircase between two floors; ‘everything that was not / myself, by the water's edge’. This self-division is productive and welcomed by the poet; the two selves are kept ‘gracefully apart’. The ‘woman born in my sleep’ is, ironically, less troubling or alienated than ‘the stranger me that is satisfied / by any street with the solemn name of a Saint’. This concurs with the experience of Proust's narrator, for whom the real world of Combray, with its ‘streets with the solemn names of saints’, was ‘a trifle depressing’ (56). Writing from within someone else's text, inscribing ‘several thicknesses’ into her own art, McGuckian allows her own three stanzas to play host to Proust's ‘Combray’. The text is like a monstrance, a receptacle used for the exhibition of relics or the transparent vessel in which the host is exposed. Like Proust's work, ‘Lines for Thanksgiving’ occupies the space between two kinds of art: the mimetic and the autotelic, ‘an art made by imitating things outside itself, and an art that is an internally coherent making’.35

Quite often McGuckian's poems address the very issue of intertextuality and can be read, on one level, as a commentary on the relations set up between poet and literary exemplar. ‘Reading in a Library’ (HTL 33) is one such text, referring in its title to the time of writing, itself a time of reading. The poem was originally included in an interim collection entitled An Invalid in War (2001) and was sent to me with the inscription ‘For the indefatigable sleuth!’ It was subsequently recollected in Had I a Thousand Lives (2003). After some literary detective work and cross-referencing it was possible to determine that the poem pays homage to the influence of Elias Canetti and the eloquence of his prose memoirs, making use, as it does, of seventeen fragments from The Torch in My Ear:36

Having made use of this second volume of Canetti's autobiography for the composition of ‘The Dead Are More Alive’ (DB 12–3; see Chapter 5), McGuckian draws on it again to construct a self-reflexive poem addressed to the Austrian polymath, giving thanks for his guiding inspiration, but also implicitly asserting her own authority. Canetti's words, (or rather, the translator's words), are refreshing and invigorating; inherently poetic, the words are like a ‘first language’ which she carries inside of her. Yet what they inspire is already foreknown and intrinsic to her own self as a poet; they awaken that which already lies dormant in her. The three negative images which follow – the ‘needles on your lips’, the ‘slightly grey’ words, the ‘waste of light’ – imply a degree of criticism. Perhaps in their original context they lack a certain poetic valency for the poet and are something which she must simply ‘swallow’. Yet for all that, she pictures herself as grateful and expectant in the following stanza, with Canetti as the benevolent master. His nurturing influence allows her voice to develop; the ‘dark dipthong’ is brought upwards into the light and given the freedom to grow. The original context for the image of the forked tree is illuminating as it is an instance of a reaffirmation of love and the occasion for the return of words. In a fit of jealous pique, Veza, a young woman with whom the young Canetti was very much in love, hid her love letters to him: ‘She […] looked for a tree that forked approximately at the level of her eyes and had a hollow space; she stuck the large package of letters inside’ (260). The letters may have been written by Veza, but they are inspiring to Canetti and ownership soon reverts back to him. Perhaps McGuckian is here both acknowledging the original provenance of her words and asserting her ownership of them in their new context. The fact that the tree ‘forks’ marks a key developmental stage: while the image reaffirms the idea of growth implicit in the poem's opening stanza (the first language is in its early developmental stage, ‘carried’ like a foetus), it suggests that the ‘first language’ has now taken a new direction. Canetti's influence on McGuckian is not, therefore, overpowering or inhibiting and does not push her ‘thoughts into / the space beneath the bed’. Indeed, the poem's conclusion asserts her own activity: rather than remaining a receptacle into which words are placed, the poet brings ‘a sentence to your body, / brimming like an island’. This suggests an offering on her part, having formed an original, coherent text from his inspiring words. ‘Body’ invokes the immediate physical presence of the precursor and the act referred to is the intimate presentation of a love-token to the master. Yet it also connotes a ‘corpus’ of work, and her poem adds to his own composition, and is not ‘supplementary’ in the negative sense. But what exactly is said to be ‘brimming like an island’? If it is ‘your body’, then one can say that McGuckian's reuse of his words is an act of communication, ending their splendid isolation. If it is the ‘I’ who is ‘brimming like an island’, then the phrase connotes both the distinctness and separateness of McGuckian's work from that of her literary exemplar.

The quotations transplanted from source texts carry an intentional meaning for McGuckian and are not arbitrary. Speaking to Blakeman, she reveals: ‘I like to find a word living in a context and then pull it out of its context. It's like they are growing in a garden and I pull them out of the garden and put them into my garden, and yet I hope they take with them some of their original soil, wherever I got them … .’37 This activity of transplantation results in a wonderfully poetic (yet seemingly decontextualised and oblique) use of language. The relation between the quoting and quoted texts is paramount; indeed, as Marjorie Garber argues (paraphrasing Walter Benjamin), ‘[t]o quote a text is to break into it, to ‘tear’ something out of it, to become a ‘thought fragment’ and thus a focus for critical attention’.38 However, there are times when McGuckian uses a source text more sparingly, for narrative purposes only. One such example is ‘The Katydid’, a poem included in the Oxford edition of The Flower Master yet excluded from the revised Gallery Press edition.39 The opening stanza contains very specific deictic elements:

A note attached to the text alerts the reader to its context: ‘The Empress Dowager tried and failed to abolish foot-binding in nineteenth-century China.’ From Marina Warner's The Dragon Empress40 we learn that the Empress Dowager, Tz'u-hsi, who effectively ruled over China as Regent (from 1862–73, 1875–89 and 1898–1908) after her husband's death on 22 August 1861, was born Lan Kuei (Little Orchid) in 1835. As an adolescent, she came to live in that part of Peking known as Pewter Lane from where she could see ‘the imperial yellow tiles of the Forbidden City’.41 Having been established as an imperial concubine of third class (Kuei Jen), her subsequent rise to power was spectacular and calculated: ‘she concentrated titles, wealth and power on her immediate relations, manipulated the succession to create her sister's son emperor, and so contrived the eclipse of the direct Aisin Gioro line by the Yehe Nara’ (Warner, 14). This ‘eclipse’ is referred to obliquely in the second stanza wherein McGuckian suggests that Tz'u-hsi's initial empowerment is due to her sexual attractiveness (and prowess):

Warner tells of how, when chosen to spend the night with the Emperor, ‘[e]tiquette required that Tz'u-hsi should crawl up from the foot towards the emperor’ (Warner, 42). The exotic images of the final line refer to sexual positions outlined by Chinese handbooks of erotic lore: ‘“The White Tiger Leaps” (woman taken from behind) … “Approaching the Fragrant Bamboo” (both standing)’ (Warner, 42–43).

Tz'u-hsi was, according to Warner, criminally avaricious, a flaw damaging to both her international and her domestic policy-making. Her love of wealth and theatrics proved devastating to the country's finances: the household alone cost £6, 500,000 per annum to run, she embezzled vast sums from the admiralty towards the reconstruction of her summer palace, and ‘the panoply of the court remained unrestrained even in the face of the imminent bankruptcy of China’ (Warner, 149). This is why the third stanza alludes to her private activities as opposed to her public duties: ‘Now she sails her marble picnic boat / In the garden of Acquatic Grasses’. While within the poem's narrative such a detail marks her rise to power, it also hints at a regal insouciance in the face of rebellion within her own territory, trade wars and imperial incursion. As Warner reveals, ‘the two-tiered paddle steamer, a folly of solid marble where Tz'u-hsi picknicked’ (168) was built with money embezzled from the navy, thus weakening the country's defences.

In the past, intertextual dialogue with precursors has been deemed problematic for an Irish woman poet. The dilemma, as it has been presented, was due to the lack of Irish female precursors. This has apparently foreclosed access to traditions which are readily available to male contemporaries. Eavan Boland,42 for example, has consistently bemoaned the remorselessly determined and determining forces acting on Irish women poets: place is a ‘brute, choiceless fact’;43 Irish history is ‘a given; we are all constructed by that construct’;44 and their status (as objects) has been been preordained.45 However, her idea of what constitutes an ‘Irish poem’ or ‘the national tradition’ remains singularly prescriptive46 and neglects the poets of the Irish Literary Revival, not all of whom reinforced the notion of the passive female, or felt duty-bound to discuss the national question.47 From an essay entitled ‘The Timely Clapper’, it is clear that, contrary to Boland, McGuckian's poetic craft has suffered little from any perceived absence of Irish female precursors. In it, she expresses a willingness to stray beyond the parochial for literary influences and hopes that, in the coming years, ‘academics would ask me to review books about Rilke as well as women's rhapsodies about him. Interview Muldoon and Ní Dhomhnaill on their symbiosis as well as ourselves alone. Show curiosity as to what Eavan or Nuala might get out of Brodsky or Walcott in a poetry conversation, for the map's sake.’48 Her diary for 1968–69,49 for example, is replete with quotations from writers as diverse as Christina Rossetti, Conrad Aiken and Laura Riding-Jackson. For a proper appreciation of McGuckian's work, it is imperative that one investigate the manner in which she interacts in her poetry with those writers whom she admires.

‘Grainne's Sleep Song’ (OBB 18) appears relatively straightforward: beginning with a speaker whose irritability is conveyed by pathetic fallacy – the day is ‘hostile’, the house ‘hadn't enough sleep either’ – its second half describes the emergence of a more creative self who leaves the ‘uncompleted story’ behind and carves verses from ‘Where Claribel low lieth’. The dramatic shift in emotional register is linked to a simultaneous change in relations between the speaker and her lover. ‘Drudgery’, pursuing kisses and demands regarding her clothing each imply the speaker's embittered dissatisfaction at her lover's imperious attitude, but ‘affectionate’ indicates a gradual assuagement, culminating in the carving of ‘both our initials in full’. Yet, as Michel Riffaterre contends, the literary text is ‘a sequence of embeddings with each significant word summarizing the syntagm situated elsewhere’,50 and one detail of ‘Grainne's Sleep Song’ stands apart as an ‘ungrammaticality’ vis-à-vis its ‘idiolectic norm’:51 the ‘pre-war squirrel jacket’. Both the jacket's style and the vague temporal deixis (‘pre-war’) intimate a context other than that of the 1980s, one which becomes clearer when the poem is compared with Olga Ivinskaya's A Captive of Time,52 a memoir of her relationship with Boris Pasternak:

Selecting anecdotes and modifying tropes, McGuckian's reading of A Captive of Time parallels her own life with that of Ivinskaya. Since the biography documents an adulterous affair, it is understandable why the poet does not advertise its presence by means of footnotes or quotation marks. However, the poem's speaker differs significantly from her Russian counterpart: whereas the former is beleaguered and put upon, the latter, though initially jealous, enjoys a mutually gratifying relationship. ‘That's how you should look’ is not imperious, but quietly suggestive; ‘the streetlights hadn't enough sleep’ does not connote peevishness, but youthful passion. Her quotations not only encode details of a clandestine love affair, but also allow her to empathise with both Ivinskaya and Pasternak as literary figures. Yet while the speaker claims the latter's writings as her own (‘Without Love’), it is noteworthy how she does not dwell on the hardships undergone by Russian writers:

Unaware that McGuckian is quoting from A Captive of Time, the reader may well surmise that the ‘letters never answered’ denote the speaker's frosty indifference, and that the ‘salads and love-walks’ attest to the resumption of cordial relations with her lover. Although this is not a misreading, it overlooks a crucial subtext: love can flourish in spite of political oppression. In A Captive of Time, the unanswered letters allude to Ivinskaya's period of incarceration at a forced labour camp (October 1949–April 1953), during which she had little contact with Pasternak; the ‘salads’ refer to the enforced change in her diet once it had been established that she was pregnant while imprisoned in the Lubianka.53 When the speaker says that she began to read of the latter instead of the former, she is consciously focusing on the positive aspects of the story. Indeed, although the concluding act of carving ‘initials in full’ refers to Ivinskaya's first horrifying interrogation,54 she transforms it into an act of blissful union: ‘Both our initials in full’.

Discovering a structured embedding of quotations in a McGuckian poem brings new contextual frames to light and helps revise the often tenuous arguments presented by academics interpeting her work. Knowledge of the particular biography or memoir the poet was using at the time of writing would have saved Patricia Boyle Haberstroh from making unwarranted assumptions like those contained in her recent Women Creating Women. Analysing ‘Little House, Big House’ (OBB 33), Haberstroh contextualises the poem within the literary/socio-political paradigm of the Anglo-Irish Big House tradition: ‘Alluding to the big houses inhabited by English settlers and the small homes of the Irish cottagers, the speaker imagines a different kind of house.’55 Since the poem is bereft of footnotes, dates, or historical personae, this is a questionable critical reflex. It is noteworthy that she does not discuss the poem's only cited placename, Tarusa – a town whose Eastern European location weakens the plausibility of her narrowly focused argument.

Knowing that Tarusa was the town in which Marina Tsvetaeva's family had their summer residence, Meva Maron was able to take the reference as evidence of a possible intertext: ‘But Tarusa and all the strawberries at the end of “Little House, Big House”, which caught my eye because I used the same quote in a more satirical poem presumably about the same time … does more than let you say, “Aha, Tsvetaeva! I've solved the crossword”.’56 However, her letter to the Honest Ulsterman is yet another example of (unintentional) misdirection since McGuckian's reference is far more indirect than Maron suspects. Although ‘Tarusa’ and the ‘strawberries’ are mentioned in Tsvetaeva's A Captive Spirit, McGuckian in fact appropriates her final lines from Ivinskaya's autobiography. Discussing the tragic suicide of Tsvetaeva on 31 August 1941, Ivinskaya laments the fact that, contrary to the Russian poet's wishes, Tsvetaeva was buried in an unmarked grave in Yelabuga:

The poem is, in effect, a meditation upon Tsvetaeva's death (‘So different from an ordinary going-away’). That McGuckian is not simply quoting Tsvetaeva, but Ivinskaya's account is confirmed by further unattributed quotations.

In the second stanza's final line, McGuckian states that she deepens shadows with her ‘autumn brown raincoat’. Connotations of death and decay are confirmed when we learn that, during her final days, Tsvetaeva was ‘dressed very badly – in a long dark dress, an old brown autumn raincoat, and a beret of a dirty-blue colour she had knitted herself’.57 Similarly, in the previous lines, McGuckian asks: ‘Why should I take / My apron off for a wineless dinner?’ The growing apathy and despair to which these lines allude are made all the more moving when we realise that before her death, Tsvetaeva ‘did not even take off the apron with the large pocket in which she had been doing her housework that morning …’ (190). McGuckian's ‘wineless dinner’ is a clever allusion to ‘For My Poems’,58 and gives one possible reason for the Russian poet's fateful decision to take her own life. The poem begins by declaring ‘For my poems, stored deep like wines of precious vintage, / I know a time will come’; during her depressing days spent in the wooden house on Zhdanov Street, it was evident that she was no longer able to compose.

‘Little House, Big House’ self-reflexively gestures towards the imaginary communication between McGuckian and Tsvetaeva: the impulsive telephone conversation – ‘That I could hardly keep my hand / From phoning you, impromptu’ – indicates that a connection between authors (across space and time) is being made. In the original context, the line refers to Pasternak's letter to Ivinskaya's mother, dated 2 January 1953, expressing his warm affection: ‘I could hardly refrain from phoning you right away – I am still trying to keep myself in hand now, because I am not supposed to get worked up’ (129). That McGuckian regarded Tsvetaeva's suicide with compassion (and even respect) is confirmed in a personal interview59 when she contrasts Tsvetaeva's conduct with that of Mayakovsky: ‘I suppose her's [suicide] was more understandable, her's was more choreographic. He had written one poem against it, and then he did it, I found it disappointing – whereas I felt that her reasons were not cowardice but real despair, and that I could admire her.’ Her ability to identify with the poet is not belied by their different social or political circ*mstances, as shown by her comments in a review of Tsvetaeva's prose:

Interestingly, the poem's title, which Haberstroh so decisively misreads, points towards an alternative reading as it contains a veiled reference to the love affair between Boris Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya. She describes how he kept a country house (dacha) at Peredelkino, a village situated 20 kilometres from Moscow, and how he lived there with his second wife, Zinaida Nikolayevna, in what is called ‘the big house’ as opposed to Ivinskaya's ‘little house’ nearby:

Several narratives conjoin, the thematics of which differ according to our own identification of the speaker and addressee. For instance, when, in the fourth stanza, McGuckian says And the house like me / Was tangled with the emotion of cut flowers', the emotion in question alternates between despair (Tsvetaeva) and frustration (Ivinskaya), depending on which historical figure she is empathising with at the time. It is also important to note the implicit link between Pasternak and Tsvetaeva which the poem makes. Ivinskaya reports in her memoirs that ‘[d]uring my years with BL I heard him speak over and over again about his sense of responsibility for Marina's return to Russia, for her feeling that she was utterly abandoned, and for her death. Till the end of his life he never ceased to mourn her’ (171). This guilt was occasioned by his reluctance to allow Tsvetaeva to stay at ‘the big house’ when she turned to him for help towards the end of her life, a refusal which he later deemed a contributing factor to her decision to commit suicide: ‘Years later BL told me that he had not invited Marina to stay – the thing he would really have liked to do – partly because of his own indecisiveness and partly because of the domestic situation at the Peredelkino house’ (180).

Without knowing the poem's source, one of the main difficulties critics face is in identifying the referents behind its multiple spatio-temporal deictics and indefinite interpersonal contexts. The stamps in ‘Little House, Big House’, for example, have ‘squirrels on them’ (BB 33): at once indicative of a particular time and place,61 they are also unspecific since it is difficult to know which postal services have issued stamps of this description. Yet Docherty and Haberstroh, though obviously correct in pointing out that multiple readings arise from McGuckian's pronouns, are both widely off the mark in their rationalisation of this technique; indeed, it is reductive to claim that the poet is presenting a ‘blank phenomenology’,62 an unidentifiable voice, as if each poem lacked specificity. ‘Visiting Rainer Maria’ (MC 10–11) is a particularly good example. While its title directs attention to an imagined meeting with Rainer Maria Rilke,63 the ‘he’ of the poem's first stanza does not simply refer to the Swiss-German poet:

The pronouns are singular, yet their referents are plural. Borrowing extensively from Clarence Brown's biography of Mandelstam,64 the poet juxtaposes several pairings within the one stanza: the first two lines refer to Mandelstam's meeting with Tsvetaeva in the Crimea; the next four are quotations from letters to and from his wife; and the conclusion describes a poem written for Arbenina, with whom he is said to have had an affair (89).

While the ‘I’ of McGuckian's poem adds herself to the list of Mandelstam's admirers, it emerges that she is also taking Mandelstam's role: his ‘blue smock’ is now worn by the Northern Irish poet. That this is a marriage of true minds becomes clearer as the poem progresses:

For the second stanza, McGuckian has selected two distinct types of phrases from Brown, linked by the dichotomy between tidiness and unkemptness: on the one hand, they allude to Mandelstam's childhood and adolesence, particularly to items of decor (books, bed) and his unclean appearance; on the other, they refer to his stay at Batum, to its steamy air and the Turk scrubbing the floor. The function of her quotations is purely descriptive, outlining scenes specific to Mandelstam. Yet by the third stanza, the speaker has become part of the audience listening to Mandelstam:

Curiously, the speaker is more acted upon than acting: the room in Batum imposes its shape upon her; she wishes to be ‘touched’ by Mandelstam, to have the same sublime reaction as Blok upon hearing the great poet speak (88). Yet her desire to lose herself completely in his poetry remains unfulfilled: ‘if he touches … [i]f he mentions …’. The ‘partings of quite a different / Cast’, though alluding to Mandelstam's ‘Tristia’ (No. 104) and his period spent as internal exile,65 also calls attention to a possible divergence by McGuckian from his poetics: her poetry radically differs from Acmeism, and does not ‘renounce the moon’ (152). However, this does not deflect her adoration for him, as is evident from the speaker's adopted subject position:

These extracts from the fifth and sixth stanzas refer, respectively, to Mandelstam's desperate loneliness at his separation from Nadhezda and to the tearful parting from Tsvetaeva. McGuckian appropriates the depth of emotion expressed by these lines; they express her love for the Russian poet. The poem's conclusion appears to contradict this harmony:

Clair Wills, though rightly pointing out that these lines refer to the disagreements which have emerged over how to translate the first line of Mandlestam's ‘Silentium’,66 does not take the reading any further. Sarah Broom, on the other hand, vigorously argues that McGuckian is reprimanding Mandelstam, claiming that ‘Mandeistam's Aphrodite … has none of the essence of the real feminine’.67 Both readings suffer from a partial knowledge of the lines' source. They actually refer to a disagreement between Clarence Brown and Richard McKane: the ‘it’ of the former's translation means ‘silence’, the ‘she’ of the latter's means ‘Aphrodite’.68 McGuckian's poem re-enacts this problem of attribution: while the ‘his’ of McGuckian's poem seems to refer to Mandelstam, it in fact refers to Brown. Broom's reading is clearly insufficient, as Mandelstam did not translate his work into English. The problem does not even arise in Russian. As Brown states, ‘the problem, if it is a problem, lies more in the translation than in the original, it being one of the penalties of speaking English that one must resolve an ambiguity of which the Russian reader may hardly be aware. In English the Russian ona is either ‘it’ or ‘she’; it cannot, as in Russian, be both it and she’ (166). The speaker is forced to choose because she speaks English; in the end, she sides with McKane.

McGuckian has been honest about her method of composition. Talking to Rebecca Wilson, she states that ‘I just take an assortment of words, though not exactly at random, and I fuse them. It's like embroidery. It's very feminine, I guess. They are very intricate, my poems, a weaving of patterns of ins and outs and contradictions, one thing playing off another.’69 However, the ‘embroidery’ is so intricate, it is little wonder that her quotations have thus far gone unremarked. An initial reading of ‘The Man with Two Women’ (MC 14–15), for example, discloses a narrative with two clear movements: the first half is the speaker's retrospective narration of her maudlin state of mind during ‘a hopelessly / ill-advised summer’, with political menace lurking in the background (‘Irish clouds … still in their / Army uniforms’); the second half reverses the prevailing gloom with its sensual, quasi-erotic account of her encounter with an unnamed lover. Yet like both ‘Grainne's Sleep Song’ and ‘Little House, Big House', the poem is complicated by the fact that its words are taken from a monograph detailing a ménage-à-trois, namely Ann and Samuel Charters’ I Love: The Story of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik.70 Indeed, the unusual verse-form provides a teasing visual clue to the identity of its biographical subject as it mimics Mayakovsky's characteristically jagged lineation:

The embroidery is intricate but cannot compensate for the stanza's stylistic inadequacies, particularly its unspectacular use of adjectives. Exactly why McGuckian deploys quotations here is at first unclear as she avoids a coherent rewriting of or commentary on the biography. The opening four lines describing the speaker's walk to the sea is made up from two quotations, the first voiced by Yury Annenkov:

There is no contextual link here with the following intertext: ‘Away from the distractions of Moscow, he [Mayakovsky] threw himself into the composition of “The Cloud in Trousers”. Kuokkala was a country resort in the sparse pine woods on the shores of the Gulf of Finland, with a gritty beach that had huge stones protruding irregularly from the water’ (43, emphasis added). While the first extract refers to his stay in Nice, the second describes a sojourn in Finland, at the summerhouse of the literary critic Kornei Chukovsky. The real purpose behind the quotations becomes evident when we realise that the poem's speaker is taking Lili Brik's place. Indeed, for McGuckian, falling in love with the muse is not uncommon: ‘When I'm with a person that's written the book, I'm almost in love with the person during the course of that book.’ The poem documents her coup de foudre whilst reading the biography. The ‘I’ is double, though without the source text one would not realise that ‘where I would sit / In a stylish sundress, / laced boots and pearls’ refers to two women, McGuckian and Lili Brik. The first half of the image comes from a description of the Briks' apartment on Zhukovsky Street (Petrograd) at the time of Mayakovsky's first meetings with Lili: ‘On the walls were Japanese fans and a large oil painting by Boris Grigoryev, a portait of Lili lying on the grass in a dress and laced boots in front of a flaming sunset, which Mayakovsky had titled “Lili Spilled Out”’ (51, emphasis added). McGuckian ties in this extract with another representation of Lili Brik (a photograph by Alexander Rodchenko), also in their apartment:

The juxtaposition of clothing imagery is not arbitrary: the extracts link together the commencement and decline of the intense love affair, a prolepsis neatly prefiguring the end of the speaker's short-lived tryst in McGuckian's own narrative. The poem's retrospective air corresponds to the subtext embedded in the first stanza: Mayakovsky's tragic suicide. Two quotations voice the speaker's desire to regress into the past and salvage something of his legacy. The first is voiced by Rita Rait directly after hearing about Mayakovsky's suicide on 14 April 1930: ‘“I go upstairs, rereading five, ten times: ‘Lili, love me’. Oh, God. Lili isn't there. Osya isn't there. Has anything happened to them?”’ (355, emphasis added). The second is spoken by Mayakovsky's associate, Lunacharsky: “‘Not all of us are like Marx, who said that poets experience a great need for kindness. Not all of us understand this, and not all of us understood that Mayakovsky was in need of great kindness, that often he needed nothing as much as a kind word, perhaps even the simplest of words; it would have reached the heart of this double, it would have balanced the deep sadness inside him’” (362, emphasis added).

Discussing how her alteration and arrangement of quotations refract the original sentiments, McGuckian states that ‘[t]he words are given to me … and the authors, and the translators, especially if they're dead, they are very aware of me using them and that they want it, they want me to make the same words live again in a new way and do things with it that carries me and marks my reading of the book and marks my learning process with them’.72 Quotations are intended to register her appreciation of the text and it is not coincidental that many self-reflexively centre around the act of reading:

In ‘The Man with Two Women’, the lover's divestment of clothing is purely sensual, a prelude to sexual consummation of mutual desire; in the source text it is used as a simile to describe Mayakovsky's heartfelt recitation of ‘The Cloud with Trousers’, how he exposed ‘the emotional pressures that were gnawing at him’ (53). McGuckian unites both meanings, hinting at her own reaction on reading about her muse. Indeed, his poem becomes ‘a kiss’, and the act of turning his ‘yard-wide shoulders’ becomes almost erotic, though in the original context it denotes Mayakovsky's ‘helplessness, loneliness, heartache’ (334) upon reciting his own poem about an exhausted horse he had seen lying on a Moscow street.

The arrangement within a single text of her eclectic assemblage of raw materials can be likened to a ‘patchwork’, the function of which is akin to, but significantly different from, that which is described in the second verse of Michael Longley's poem of the same name:

Recycling text is not useful in itself. However, if the ‘previous templates’ are not burned away but held together and made either ironic or parodic, the reader can be made aware of the intricate workings and purposeful intent of the new text. The stitching together of textual fragments is not an uncritical act; rather, as one reviewer (in a different context) put it, McGuckian ‘is not sewing things up, but taking them apart, and the finery which she decks out her poems initially disguises the real point of her needlework – which is to unstitch, expose, impale’.74 Although the craft under discussion in her early poetic manifesto ‘The Seed-Picture’ (FM 23) uses seeds rather than thread, it is still a ‘womanly or domestic’ craft according to the poet,75 and the image used to convey confinement is notably that of embroidery:

The ‘sampler’ not only connotes a beginner's exercise, but also the pattern or archetype from which a copy may be taken, suggesting the continuation of tradition. Yet such an occupation is restrictive, enclosing the woman ‘in one continuous skin’, and is dictated (ominously) by ‘the length of a man’. The danger is made even more apparent at the poem's close, when the speaker states that

The final two lines contain an ironic awareness of marginality: though symbolising confinement, the portrait, like a latter-day version of Browning's ‘My Last duch*ess’, disturbs patriarchy, since the woman's image, silent and enclosed within a frame, is implicitly given a voice.

One must be wary when ascribing such a marginal position to McGuckian considering that she has been published by the Oxford University Press for nine years and currently has contracts with Wake Forest (USA) and Gallery Press (Republic of Ireland). The fact that she has been the recipient of the Eric Gregory Award (1980), the Rooney Prize (1982), a Northern Ireland Bursary (1982), an Alice Hunt Barlett Award (1983), the Cheltenham Festival of Literature Award (1989) and the American Ireland Fund Literary Award (1998) also weakens the case for marginal status. However, it is true that, in contrast to Muldoon's overt use of citation, McGuckian feels impelled to adopt a more covert form of ironic intertextuality in order symbolically to undermine the (male) English canon: ‘I have to live under this mountain and try to belong to it without becoming narrow or jealous, to be eternally grateful to Milton without being deluged into silence, to continue what women have begun without succumbing to the inevitable real or ritual self-immolation.’76 The gathering together of seeds (vocabulary) and subsequent attachment ‘by the spine to a perfect bedding’ (i.e. her book of poems) constitute a ‘deterritorialization’, a ‘writing in the interstices of masculine culture, moving between use of the dominant language or form of expression and specific versions of experience based on marginality.’77 In a third-year university essay entitled ‘The Idea of an Anglo-Irish Tradition’, Maeve T. P. McCaughan (as she was then known) wrote about the tension between the anxiety of influence and the need for enabling precursors. Focusing on the poetry of W. B. Yeats, she stated that ‘[i]t was because he was capable of this supreme detachment that Yeats transcended the pronunciation of his poetic predecessors to become a major influence in English and world literature. And yet it was only through their pronunciation that he eventually found his medium.’78 Her method of working ‘through their pronunciation’ is, however, very different from that of Yeats as she has to struggle against a male-orientated canon. Her thoughts on this matter are revealed in a tribute to Eavan Boland where she quotes approvingly from Gilbert and Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic:

McGuckian's redefinition of ‘the terms of her socialization’ takes the form of embedded quotations, the thematics of which emphasise her struggle against patriarchy.

Gilbert and Gubar's seminal study of the way in which women are depicted in patriarchal Western culture contends: ‘the text's author is a father, a progenitor, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power like his penis’ (6). Male sexuality is, therefore, ‘the essence of literary power’ (4); female sexuality, by contrast, is defined as passive, subordinate and devoid of this generative power. What, then, ‘does it mean to be a woman writer in a culture whose fundamental definitions of literary authority are … both covertly and overtly patriarchal?’ (45–6). The woman is inscribed in literary texts as either an ‘angel in the house’ or as a ‘monster-woman’, one who ‘embodies intransigent female autonomy’ (28). One of the key examples cited early on by Gilbert and Gubar is that of the fairy tale Snow White, in which the ‘vexing polarities of angel and monster, sweet dumb Snow White and fierce mad Queen’ are depicted. Their monograph investigates how such imagery influences ‘the ways in which women attempt the pen’ (46) and argues that, when writing, the nineteenth-century female author must combat such a restrictive and self-defeating socio-sexual differentiation by redefining the way in which she herself is read. While contemporary women are able to ‘attempt the pen with energy and authority’, they are only able to do so ‘because their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century foremothers struggled in isolation […] to overcome the anxiety of authorship that was endemic to their literary subculture’ (51).

McGuckian's response is to pay homage to her literary foremothers, and to Gilbert and Gubar, by constructing a poem from within The Madwoman in the Attic. She uses intertextual allusions in ‘Journal Intime’ (MC 26) to inscribe within her own text the psychodrama of female literary authorship:

The opening sentence portrays evocatively the female writer's imprisoning gendered subject position. The ‘dreams’ suggest a male fantasy of female enclosive domesticity; socialised as a passive, submissive and subservient angel of the house, the woman's own dreams are delimited by ‘the deathdevoted colour of masculinity’. The outlet for the woman's writing is restricted to the private self-communication of a ‘Journal Intime’. The woman as ‘angel’ is selfless and, as Gilbert and Gubar argue, she is not just ‘a memento of otherness’, she is also a ‘memento mori’. The angel-woman, the ‘spiritual messenger, an interpreter of mysteries to wondering and devoted men, […] becomes, finally, a messenger of the mystical otherness of death’ (24, emphasis added). The three quotations used by McGuckian inscribe and conjoin three important contexts. Referring to the way in which the Queen internalises the strictures uttered by her looking-glass in Snow White, Gilbert and Gubar cite Simone de Beauvoir's contention that women ‘still dream through the dreams of men’ (76). The woman, therefore, lacks all agency and her social (and literary) role is defined by men. This is reiterated by the second quotation which refers to Charlotte Gilman Perkins' The Yellow Wallpaper (1890), a story that recounts in the first person the experiences of a woman suffering from post-partum depression. Having been forbidden by her husband to write until she has fully recovered,80 she is confined to a room which she thinks of as ‘a one-time nursery and becomes, in turn, intrigued and horrified by its yellow wallpaper. She begins to discern the figure of a woman (her alter ego) moving behind its outside pattern: At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candle light, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it as plain as can be.’81 In the story, the woman reads her self as a text; she begins to read, in Annette Kolodny's words, ‘her own psyche writ large’.82 This, in effect, is what McGuckian is doing in the poem: she is discovering the symbolisation of the woman writer's untenable reality and is attempting to escape such male codification. The third quotation intimates one attempt at escape by citing Mrs. Gaskell's remark regarding the Brontë sisters' desire ‘“to throw the colour of masculinity into their writing”’ (70).

Such an attempt at ‘putting on’ (or acquiring) male power is central to the concerns of the four-line sentence that concludes the opening stanza. The lines are almost impossible to paraphrase as they can be read in a number of differing ways. What ‘the Weak-eyed’ might see in the ‘artfully-placed mirrors’ is a ‘grieving shape’, someone who is ‘more than sister, more than wife’. Is the female author caught within the binary oppositions set out by patriarchy, defined within the ‘artfully-placed mirrors’? Is the female author here equated with ‘the Weak-eyed’, or does she actively construct a self in her art which only the ‘Weak-eyed’ could construe as ‘a single, grieving shape’? As such, is this subversive ‘self’ free from the codification which defines her only in relation to the male (‘more than sister, more than wife’)? The five textual fragments sampled from Madwoman in the Attic provide a clue as to McGuckian's intent. They refer to the battle waged by two female authors – George Eliot and Mary Shelley – with ‘Milton's bogey, namely the misogynistic portrayal of women in literature, and the way in which this (pre)determines the subordinate nature of the female writer. Gilbert and Gubar delineate the female writers’ anxieties towards this bogey: in Milton's account of woman, she is secondary to man, an Other whose ‘otherness leads inexorably to her demonic anger, her sin, her fall, and her exclusion from that garden of the gods which is also, for her, the garden of poetry’ (191). What the female writer sees in literary texts – when art acts as a mirror put up to nature – is a monster, akin to Gilman Perkins' woman in the wallpaper or the Queen's self reflected in the looking-glass. The first quotation refers to Frankenstein's obsession with incest, whereby the likenesses between each character are ‘like the solipsistic relationships among artfully placed mirrors’ (228). Although it is a standard Gothic trope, in Shelley's text it is said to be a ‘metaphor for the solipsistic fever of self-awareness’ (229). The text establishes a number of characters whose histories ‘echo and re-echo’ each other (229) because it is a self-reflexive psychodrama, one in which the author is attempting to discern her own position within the Miltonic schema. Eliot's Middlemarch can be viewed in the same way since Dorothea is depicted as wishing to make herself the equal of Casaubon by being ministered to by this ‘weak-eyed’ husband (215). While the powers of the Miltonic father-figure ‘are not quite absolute’ (215), nevertheless Dorothea is said to transform, ultimately, into ‘the archetypal wretched woman Blake characterized as Milton's wailing six-fold Emanation, his three wives and three daughters gathered into a single grieving shape’ (218, emphasis added). McGuckian's text, then, registers the way in which two foremothers struggled to wield the pen and delivers a judgement on their efforts: while the ‘weak-eyed’ may have regarded them as marginal Others, and although the characters within their texts may have been marginalised and subject to the strictures of patriarchy, nevertheless to the contemporary reader the authors themselves can hardly be described diminutively as ‘single, grieving shape[s]’.

‘Journal Intime’ can itself be regarded as an ‘artfully placed mirror’. First, the text itself is mirror-like in that the opening tropes and quotations are repeated in its conclusion:

McGuckian references the two texts cited in the opening stanza: Snow White and The Yellow Wallpaper. For Gilbert and Gubar, the prospect of being ‘caught and trapped in a mirror rather than a window […] is to be driven inward, obsessively studying self-images as if seeking a viable self’ (37). McGuckian's poem, of course, is one such mirror into which she herself is looking and working out her own psychodrama, and that of her foremothers. The reference, though, refers to the first Queen, who dies when giving birth to Snow White, and who is said to have been freer than the ‘evil’ Queen in that she ‘looked outward, if only upon the snow’ (37). The poem, however, decidedly states that this is ‘so / Unthinkable’; the woman's gaze is forced to remain within the ‘one-time nursery’ (referring to the unnamed protagonist's place of confinement in The Yellow Wallpaper). This location is contrasted with the carefree environment of the womb, the ‘child's first house’: repetition here has to do with the passing on of biological traits; it is only when the child becomes socialised that she becomes subject to patriarchal codification. Yet while the fairy tale suggests that the second Queen ‘has internalised the King's rules’ because ‘his voice resides now in her mirror, in her mind’, McGuckian's poem argues against this. Her literary foremothers, she implies, have deconstructed the workings of patriarchy in their texts. Thus, the female author's voice is said to fill ‘the mouth / Of her won mirror’. Within the patriarchal code this would mean that she was indeed ‘a failure’ as she has not allowed herself to become a subordinate figure deprived of authorship, but not for a contemporary author like McGuckian.

The poem is also an ‘artfully placed mirror’ owing to its method of construction. For Gilbert and Gubar – citing Adrienne Rich – one of the key strategies in the feminist revisionary struggle is ‘“the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction”’ (49), and this is precisely what the Northern Irish poet does. Constructing a palimpsest – a literary psychohistory – she incorporates the tropes and ideas of her foremothers in order to read into, and out from, their psychodramas. Crucially, she does so by using their one of their own strategies whereby ‘revolutionary messages are concealed behind stylistic facades’ (74). The embedded citations, unacknowledged and devoid of quotation marks, replay the concealments and evasions of her predecessors.83 Indeed, reading about the strategies employed by her precursors affirms her own right to lift the pen.

In her work, McGuckian celebrates the art of key female literary precursors. One striking example is ‘Garbo at the Gaumont’,84 a poem based on Tatyana Tolstoy's moving biography of her father, Tolstoy Remembered.85 McGuckian's text characteristically calls attention to this act of quotation:

McGuckian's ‘love’ for the muse (Tatyana Tolstoy) borrows from the ‘house’ (text) in order to bring the precursor to life. By inserting a quotation relating to the room in which Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, McGuckian has, in fact, metaphorically refurbished the Tolstoy residence at Yasnaya Polyana: ‘We imagined we were exploring the rooms my father had described in his novel’, writes Tatyana Tolstoy, ‘and we argued passionately over exactly which room had been used for what, as though the Rostovs had been actual people who really lived there once’ (144, emphasis added). The poem ends with a quotation intimating the reciprocation of the poet's love: ‘“The day after the day after tomorrow I shall come into the nursery and kiss you … My fine and sprightly wife, my darling wife”’ (195–96, emphasis added). Although the conclusion may well be voiced by Leo Tolstoy, it is not his love that the poet requires; indeed, much of the poem questions his beliefs. Clarifying the poem's title, Tatyana Albertini's epigraphical essay makes a pointed reference to the hardship which both she and her mother had to endure owing to Leo Tolstoy's conscientious objection to materialism:

Clarifying the poem's title, Tatyana Albertini's epigraphical essay makes a pointed reference to the hardship which both she and her mother had to endure owing to Leo Tolstoy's conscientious objection to materialism:

The title not only points to Leo Tolstoy's presence in the poem through its allusion to Anna Karenina, but it also indirectly contrasts Karenina's suicide with Tatyana Tolstoy's indefatigableness and it suggests a belated rebellion against the father figure. Similarly, the first stanza questions his unenlightened chauvinism toward women:

The poem shares with Tatyana Tolstoy's reminiscences a wry intelligence that undermines the apparent capitulation to patriarchy. Towards the end of the first stanza, for example, McGuckian notes the debilitating effects that child-care has upon the writing of poetry: in the new context, it is the son, and not the father, who forcibly turns the woman around. However, the ‘book’ has not remained ‘unread’ and, despite the distractions of caring for children, she has succeeded in writing her poem. The patronising essentialism of ‘Like a true woman’ rings hollow when related to Tolstoy Remembered. Attempting to overcome her father's prejudices about women writers, Tatyana Tolstoy tricks him into believing that an article she had written, summarising the principles of the American economist Henry George, had in fact been produced by a certain ‘P. Polilov’. Taken in by the ruse, her father stubbornly maintains that a woman cannot produce a sustained, booklength version of the article:

Although she may have never finished that particular economic treatise, she did go on to write the biography.

Tolstoy Remembered clearly provides McGuckian with an enabling female precursor and is used again for the same purpose in ‘A Small Piece of Wood’ (MC 31–32). The relative obscurity of this poem's source material explains to some extent the ways in which she has consistently been misread and lies behind the greatest watershed in McGuckian's career to date: the enforced change of publishing house from Oxford to Gallery Press. Correspondence from both her editor at Oxford University Press, Jacqueline Simms,87 and her assistant editor, George Miller,88 details their unwillingness either to publish a new book of poems (Marconi's Cottage) or to reprint her first three collections since a Selected Poems was planned for November 1991. While such a course of action made economic sense,89 it was certainly not in the poet's best interests. Crucial information explicating Simms's dissatisfaction with the new work can be found in an earlier letter which contains a detailed analysis of two poems, ‘A Small Piece of Wood’ (MC 31–32) and ‘The Unplayed Rosalind’ (MC 59–61), and illustrates the problems of not being aware of McGuckian's source texts. In the letter, her editor expresses her confusion upon reading the new poems and states that she feels out of her depth.90 At the heart of her argument with McGuckian lies a plea for thematic coherence (linearity, narrative closure) and a reader-friendly text (commonly known literary allusions). While Simms, in her capacity as a freelance agent working for a large publishing company, is justified in wondering whether McGuckian should consider the future reader's confused reaction to the poems, her idea of which ‘reader’ the poet is writing for remains undefined. Her advice is sincere and cogent, but she clearly misunderstands the poetry. As is clear from her letter, Simms regards the poems as containing irrelevant verses and suggests that they work only by free association. Yet the apparent arbitrariness results from McGuckian's carefully interpolated narratives which function simultaneously on a number of thematic levels. Part of the blame must lie with McGuckian, as Simms clearly asks for confirmation about the poem's references. For example, she asks what ‘Choorka’ means. It is clear from a subsequent letter that no further clarification has been given, and therefore Simms continued to greet the poem with an unsympathetic response.91

The ‘Choorka’ reference is, in fact, closely ‘implicated’ in the poem as a whole, but recognising this is dependent on being familiar with the poet's source material. Simms's assumption that ‘[n] otes would kill your poems dead’ is only valid for certain kinds of footnotes (long-winded, overly elaborate), and her claim that bibliographical citation or acknowledgement of indebtedness would ‘let you off the hook’ is unfounded since they would, in fact, allow critics to assess the aesthetic merits of her scholarly quotations. Bearing this in mind, one should compare the attitude adopted by Simms with the reader's report from Wake Forest which stated that ‘the “detective work” of positivist, fact-seeking interpretation won't help’; what is required, the report goes on to suggest, is ‘an intuitive, perhaps unconscious, whole-hearted engagement, one that nevertheless places unusual demands on one's intellectual and academic resources, with an extraordinary poetic imagination’.92 This report takes on the mantle of critical nemesis, redressing the faults of an earlier assessment commissioned by Oxford University Press. While the latter is questionable in its essentialist thinking and unwarranted prognosis (that McGuckian had reached ‘an impasse of “almost schizophrenic alienation”’), the rebuttal overcompensates for the positivist approach. Although it would be foolish to assert that a sustained positivistic methodology could ever produce a definitive account of a McGuckian poem – as if such a thing were possible – nevertheless any research which enlightens her readership as to the meaning or significance of obscure references, and which pinpoints specific areas of ambiguity, ought to be welcomed. ‘Detective work’ and intuitive response can complement each other and it is demonstrably unwise to disavow the possibility of conscious argument within McGuckian's poetry.

The rare inclusion of a footnote affords the reader a glimpse of the familiar ghosts that glide in between the interstices of this text: ‘“Choorka”, one of Tolstoy's pet names for his daughter, is translated to give the poem its title’ (MC 110). The footnote focuses the reader's attention wholly on the speaker's adoption of Tatyana's soubriquet, thereby establishing a salient parallel between two father–daughter relationships. In its original context, ‘Choorka’ acts as a testament to the enduring love of Tatyana Tolstoy for an inspiring paternal figure:

McGuckian's insertion of the same word into an alternative context still maintains the theme of filial devotion (to her own father), but its status as intertext enables her to extend this metaphorically to incorporate literary paternity. Indeed, her rewriting often centres thematically on the very notion of ‘power’ and reconfigures the allocated gender positions of the original text:

The ‘apple’ calls to mind the poem's earlier images of learning (the ‘lesson-filled inkwell’, ‘Pictures in children's books’) since the first letter of the English alphabet is traditionally represented in elementary textbooks as an ‘apple’ to enable the child to discover the function of the abstract signifier, W. In the final stanza, however, while the ‘apple’ is likened to ‘a feather-room’, suggesting incubation and materials for flight, its effect is decidedly ambiguous: ‘infectious star’ can indeed suggest an enthusiasm which spurs the child on to growth (from seed to star, progressing upwards), but ‘infectious’ hints at a more pernicious influence. The ‘star’ no longer implies that destiny is due to nature, but, rather, to nurture. The ambiguity continues into the final two lines. Whereas the original context in Tolstoy Remembered insists upon an unqualified affection for the father, in its translated form ‘Choorka’ (‘a small piece of wood’) suggests the demeaning ways in which this love was often reciprocated. In her one ‘hundred and eight ruled pages’,94 McGuckian attempts to counter the effects of patriarchal ‘rule’ by genderswapping and symbolically bestowing the mantle of the male literary figure (Leo Tolstoy) on to the female (Tatyana Tolstoy). This she has done in the very first stanza:

McGuckian puts immense strain on words. By means of telegraphic-like compression, the temporal and biological aspects of ‘a pause of blood’ suggests at once female menstruation, kinship (father—daughter), and the interiorisation of natural forces. Indeed, the speaker manages to domesticate nature (‘secret shelves of weather’) and, suggesting a similitude with art (‘With its few rhymes’), goes on to interiorise and textualise nature until it becomes enclosed in her ‘lesson-filled inkwell’. Most striking, however, is the ambiguous gender of the speaker, at once a ‘poetess’ and a ‘Yeoman’. In the original context (autumn, 1872), the action of closing an inkwell is Tatyana's attempt to shield her written thoughts from the prying eyes of her father: ‘I didn't want anyone – even the nearest and dearest to me – penetrating my inner world. I had locked myself away in my own solitude and I didn't want to share my thoughts and feelings, however insignificant, with anyone at all.’95 McGuckian admits her own related desire for secrecy in a remarkable conversation with Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill: ‘I began to write poetry so that nobody could read it. Nobody. Even the ones who read it would not understand it, and certainly no other poet would understand it.’96 Although in ‘A Small Piece of Wood’, McGuckian publicly reveals this need, thus paradoxically contradicting the desire for privacy, her concealed use of Tolstoy's biography masks the real narrative – the usurpation of the (literary) father.

The frequent intersections of McGuckian's poem with Tatyana Tolstoy's biography creates a doubled speaking self, but the gender of the figure who rides out to hunt is the androgynous poetess/Yeoman of the Month. The passage in the biography from which the above images emerge reveals the simultaneous birth of the writer and the symbolic (though also painfully literal) fall of her father; thus the poet overcomes the anxiety of influence:

That this stanza refers to the emergence of Tatyana Tolstoy and Medbh McGuckian as writers is confirmed by a letter to the poet Fet dated 23 January 1865, in which Leo Tolstoy writes that ‘[a] fter my horse had thrown me, breaking my arm, my first thought when I regained consciousness was that I was a writer. Yes, I really am a writer, but a solitary writer, a silent writer’ (149). McGuckian appropriates the experience from the father and transfers its significance to the daughter by employing the conventional metaphor of procreation for poetic composition: the ‘Yeoman’ is clearly pregnant.

McGuckian's poems are palimpsests, a means of writing in the interstices of texts, boring thru the white between the lines, scribbling on the margins'.97 Delineating the strategic values of a palimpsest, DuPlessis writes,

Rather than ‘disseminated and absorbed poems’, McGuckian brings her analysis to bear mainly upon biographies, collections of prose essays and literary correspondence. This is appropriately termed ‘her borrowing, “translating” method’ by Clair Wills,99 who does not realise just how pervasive this threading of ‘double-stranded words’ BB 57) was in McGuckian's work.100 In a palimpsest there is ‘foreground and background, new statement and obscured original which can be discovered with the force of a revelation or something left overwritten in undecidable layering’.101 This doubleness is important as McGuckian's quotations function as ‘grafts’, engendering ‘a new textual configuration qualitatively different from the simple sum of two units’.102 McGuckian frequently employs a trope signifying doubleness to self-reflexively comment on the parallels she sets up by using quotations. ‘A Small Piece of Wood’, for example, uses an image from Tolstoy Remembered for just such a purpose:

Of course, unlike the two rivers, the different narrative levels of McGuckian's palimpsests do intersect and, although not essential for an enjoyment of the poem, awareness of how she engages with her sources is important: ‘I think that if someone had all the clues then it would be more of an enjoyable crossword puzzle, but for someone who didn't they would just enjoy the sounds of the words on their own and the allusions wouldn't be as deep for them but they would still have a surplus attractiveness.’103

Basing her conclusions on a single example of McGuckian's appropriative praxis, Clair Wills unduly dismisses the idea that one should look for an interpretation of an author's work in McGuckian's poetry. But McGuckian's quotations are not simply ‘reconfigurations’ of words;104 not only do we have ‘the manipulation of the borrowed text’, but also ‘a return effect from the new version to the original version which it contaminates and puts in perspective’.105 One notable example is ‘Gigot Sleeves’ (MC 35–36). Borrowing from Winifred Gérm's106 compelling biography of Emily Brontë, McGuckian's intention is to present us with a picture of the nineteenth-century poet-novelist as ‘a revolutionary who dies on hunger strike’:107

The poem's conclusion refers to Gérm's description of Brontë's illness: ‘its relentless progress, the emaciation, the fever, the shortness of breath, the pain in the side, all confirmed the family's terrors of worse to come’ (248, emphasis added). Her death was, according to Dr Wheelhouse, due to ‘Consumption – 2 months' duration’ (259, emphasis added) and the dimensions of her coffin are recorded as ‘5 feet 7 inches by 16 inches’ (259). McGuckian alters the diagnosis, implying that Brontë's condition was self-induced, a protest at her restricted life.

Much of the poem's description of her living conditions – in the second, third and ninth stanzas – are taken from one paragraph:

McGuckian, to use Maura Dooley's words, ‘reel[s] in / life with someone else's bait’.108 Taking five excerpts from the above passage, she quotes them in the second, third and tenth stanzas of her poem, insisting at all times on the cramped nature of Emily Brontë's surroundings. Even the one seemingly incongruous detail, ‘the black horsehair sofa’, is taken from a passage to do with the writer's increasing frailty.109 By stressing the phrase ‘a pair of months’, McGuckian echoes Gérin realisation that Brontë's contracting tuberculosis was far from inevitable during her long illness.

In ‘Gigot Sleeves’, McGuckian is open to the criticism that Tim Kendall leveled at Paul Muldoon's ‘7, Middagh Street’.110 In both instances, the literary allusions place a heavy burden upon the reader. To be intelligible, Muldoon's poem requires knowledge of Humphrey Carpenter's W.H. Auden: A Biography. Similarly, the reader who does not recognize McGuckian's debt to Gérin will not pick up on the homage paid to Brontë. Yet however oblique her strategy may be, McGuckian's treatment of her subject remains very different from that of the biographer. The poet's economic appropriation of text enables her not only to explore certain root causes of Emily Brontë's demise (the austere living conditions at Haworth parsonage, the stubborn neglect of her health), but also to depict them formally. Indeed, the dimensions of her coffin are juxtaposed with the size of Emily's living space: while William Wood, the village carpenter, says that ‘he had never in all his experience made so narrow a shell for an adult’ (259), McGuckian implies that the coffin differed little from the room in which she wrote. Emily Brontë's emaciation parallels that of the house (‘the / Narrow sliproom’, ‘the square of carpet’); the gradual disappearance of both writer and building is figured literally in the enjambment at the poem's close whereby one swiftly moves from ‘five foot seven by sixteen’ to ‘Inches of a pair of months’ to ‘stopped’. Never has closure seemed so final.

Many of McGuckian's borrowings from Gérin deliberately set up a particular image of Emily Brontë, one which counters preconceived notions of her as a sheltered recluse, and offers instead the portrayal of a lively, engaging woman: ‘The double-cherry performs a dance behind / Triple gauze, she takes out the bulldogs, / Masters a pistol.’ (MC 35). Emphasising her subject's vibrant creativity, Gérin refers to one incident when, on Oak Apple Day, the Brontë children decided to re-enact Charles II's escape from Worcester, and Emily adopted the role of the King, hiding from the multitude in the tree-tops:

With the slow decline of her father's eyesight, Emily learned the skills necessary to defend the houshold should the need ever arise: ‘Her willingness to learn may be assumed considering her imaginative girlhood among “the fighting gentry” of Gondal. Indeed to master a pistol might be a more congenial task than learning French grammar’ (147, emphasis added).

McGuckian's meticulous description of Emily Brontë's clothing – the skirts splashed with ‘purple suns’ – appears more appropriate to the post-hippy generation of the early 1970s111 than to Victorian England. Yet this is part of the ‘rediscovery’ of Brontë which the poet fosters, and is based on ample biographical evidence. In her biography, Gérin quotes an excerpt from The Life of Charlotte Brontë, in which Mrs. Gaskell recounts that when Brontë was staying at the Hotel de Hollande, 1 Rue de la Putterie, she ‘“had taken a fancy to the fashion, ugly and preposterous even during its reign, of gigot sleeves, and persisted in wearing them long after they were ‘gone out’. Her petticoats, too, had not a curve or a wave in them, but hung straight and long, clinging to her lank figure”’ (131, emphasis added). Reinforcing her portrayal of an unconventional Emily Brontë, Gérin describes a shopping expedition:

That McGuckian's Emily Brontë – the tragic, ‘half-untamed’, solitary figure – is reminiscent of a Romantic, Byronic hero reflects a biographical assumption of Byron's profound influence on the Yorkshire writer.112 In personal correspondence McGuckian reveals that ‘I was re-reading Byron and found again ‘a spreading here, a condensation there’ which I used in “Gigot Sleeves”. I suggest she [Emily Brontë] was more Byron than he.’113 Her characterization of Brontë also reflects Gérin's view that ‘Emily Brontë was no plagiarist; few novelists were so original as she. What she took from Byron she took because the seed lay in her’ (46). Gérin's emphasis on Brontë's originality may also lie behind McGuckian's allusion in the eighth stanza of ‘Gigot Sleeves’ to Edward J. Trelawny's Recollections:

Within the framework of the poem, the reference functions proleptically, prefiguring the death of the female poet, but within the wider context of McGuckian's obvious concern with the anxiety of influence, the ritual burning of the dead poet's body could suggest her attempt at poetic originality, free from any precursor's influence. Yet this reading begs the question: while Brontë may have fully internalised and personalised the influence of Byron, has McGuckian's creativity, as ‘poetic biographer’, suffered while reading the lives of others? Like Joyce's Shem the Penman, is she sham or shaman, plagiarist or Pelagian:115 ‘Who can say how many pseudostylic shamiana, how few or how many of the most venerated public impostures, how very many piously forged palimpsests slipped in the first place by this morbid process from [her] pelagiarist pen?’116 To what extent does McGuckian's ‘intimate’ reading constitute a significant reworking of the original?

McGuckian's unacknowledged borrowings in almost every poem over the course of eleven collections are certainly greater than those of Graham Swift, whose textual (and structural) similarities to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying caused such a furore following his Booker Prize win for Last Orders.117 Yet they are also significantly fewer than those of the ‘pathological plagiarist’ who plagued Neal Bowers, as documented in his Words for the Taking.118 Her appropriation of source material may usefully be compared to that of two Irish contemporary writers. The playwright Brian Friel borrowed extensively, but without acknowledgement, from George Steiner's After Babel when writing his masterpiece Translations, but he was never once accused of plagiarism.'119 More recently, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's practice of selecting excerpts from folklore without due acknowledgement has been questioned by both Proncias O'Drisceoil and Gabriel Rosenstock.120 However, the ‘unease’ which both critics felt was not put down to suspicions of plagiarism. In light of McGuckian's use of biographical material in relation to female writers, it is tempting to bring Laura J. Rosenthal's thesis to bear on the twentieth century and claim that plagiarism can be seen as ‘a problem of social subjectivity – and thus a problem of gender’.121 Rosenthal argues that originality became ‘a strategy for (self-)ownership one hundred years earlier in response to reconceptualizations of property that emphasized individual ownership but limited who could inhabit the position of owner’.122 Yet McGuckian does not occupy a comparably marginal position and has access to various literary traditions.123 Nor is it feasible to invoke Harold Bloom's psychological model of intrapoetic relationships which contends that, to overcome the anxiety of influence and ‘clear an imaginative space for themselves’,124 ‘strong’ poets always begin by misreading their precursors; in contrast, McGuckian seeks to revivify them. As she stated in a letter: ‘A work of art is good only if it has sprung from necessity. In this nriire of its origin lies its judement. There is no other.’125

In the course of preparing this book, I published a couple of articles on McGuckian's poetry which prompted a flurry of correspondence from her. She was unhappy with the fact that I was looking for, and uncovering, the sources behind her work. Apologising for her initial anger, and in an effort to describe her own method of poetic composition, she wrote a poem entitled ‘Mantilla’126 and dedicated it to me. The first verse reads as follows (source added on the left):127

McGuckian self-consciously describes the action of writing a poem with the aid of a source text, the immediate purpose of which, in this instance, is purely therapeutic. She stated in the letter: ‘I had to write something in the usual way as soon as I – as I shouldn't??? – could in case I never would again. But I was very aware in this of doing so, and trying not to be anyone but myself, and also of your dedication to your thankless task of studying me.’ The perceived (and wholly unintentional) criticism in my articles had caused the poet great fear, anxiety and anger, yet she learned, through meditation, to make peace with it. ‘The sadness of anxiety’, says the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Han, ‘can be used as a means of liberation from torment and suffering, like using a thorn to remove a thorn.’ For her, the poems are ‘resurrective’, bringing her familiar ghosts back to life – their time is also her time. While ‘shed’ has the connotation of separation, it also means to send forth as an emanation, an activity usually applied to ‘the origination of created beings from God’. Both usages are relevant since those whom her poetry brings back to life are the precursor poets rather than their biographers who supply the actual words:

However, although she distances herself from the work of the source text, she still uses the author's words. Therefore, the question which must be asked is whether or not McGuckian's verse really does have an ‘imaginative signature’, her own unique ‘poetic DNA pattern’.129 The genetic make-up of her poems has an inherent doubleness, forming what Michael Davidson has termed a palimtext. Foregrounding its intertextual and inter-discursive aspects, Davidson suggests that a palimtext is ‘a writing-in-process’ which ‘retains vestiges of prior writings out of which it emerges’, and, more importantly, ‘it is the still-visible record of responses to those early texts’.130 This relationship between the source text and poem is complex, as is evident in the third stanza of ‘Mantilla’:

While ‘vassal state’ suggests subordination, this is not meant to imply a weakness in the poet; instead, it represents the openness to inspiration, a willingness to welcome the approach of the Muse through the words of a biography or other source. Like the ‘staircase’ of ‘Lines for Thanksgiving’, the connective ‘bridge of breathing’ is the vital element.131 McGuckian's poetic praxis constitutes a rewriting, ‘a repetition that distorts and misquotes, that destroys in order to transform’.132 Dovetailing quotations within her own work offers a belated tribute to an admired author and registers her own continuing engagement with their oeuvre and life. This does not constitute plagiarism. Indeed, I concur with Thomas Mallon's eloquent disquisition on plagiarism in his wide-ranging Stolen Words: reworking T. S. Eliot's dictum that immature poet's imitate and mature poets steal,133 he maintains that ‘the writer need not blush about stealing if he makes what he takes completely his, if he alchemizes it into something that is, finally, thoroughly new’.134 McGuckian's palimpsests are original and, even though they are oblique, they possess the coherence which many of her reviewers feel they lack.

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