Medbh mcguckian biography definition
•
A grey light with a gossamer tinge
Through his eyes. Those diaphanous
Hands, on the dawn which follows
The midnight after a death.
Their nearness lent a new weight
To the interlocking between angels,
Blackmarket lemons on a forest day
When I cottoned on to this and ruled
The winter, in a sheltered river whose
Mouth is hidden, since death itself is
After all an angel.
In Milton angels were a mirror
Of God’s thoughts, though they themselves
May not be eternal, they caused
The fall of one third of the stars.
Our rage for angelic protection softens
The olive wood angels, the answering
Angel by way of dreamfast. Each
Of our souls is sown in a star, or stored
Away in the planets by the angel
Christ, the earth of the soul is a climate
That secretes its own light.
Our shallower companion, Time, is an
Envious shadow, plaiting hair that looks
Like air, our cloudy child of black
Summer fires. You have to rely on moonlight,
The best red of self-willed
•
&#;I like myself poems that are gentle rather than arrogant intellectually. Where language fades into cries or whispers.&#; &#; Medbh McGuckian
&#;Hate those two words together, they are so unwomanly and unpoetic together they cancel each other out. &#;Poet&#; I don&#;t like or &#;woman&#; or &#;man&#; none of these words although I have had to use them. &#;Female&#; not much better. &#;Poetess&#; actually I like the sound.&#; &#; Medbh McGuckian on being called a &#;woman poet&#;.
Born in Belfast on this day in , poet Medbh McGuckian studied with Seamus Heaney at Queen&#;s College, and met other Northern Irish poets like Paul Muldoon (post on him here) and Ciarán Carson (post on him here) while there. She had already decided to be a poet during her time in a convent school, and she began to publish things here and there in the mid- to late 70s. A harsh time in Belfast. Her poems do not directly address the violence of Northern Ireland. Her concerns are personal. As the quote
•
&#;I know being a woman for me for a long time was being less, being excluded, being somehow cheap, being underlägsen, being sub. I associated being a woman with being a Catholic and being Irish with being from the North, and all of these things being not what you wanted to be. If you were a woman, it would have been better to be a man; if you were Catholic, it would have been a lot easier to be Protestant; if you were from the North, it was much easier to be from the South; if you were Irish, it was much easier to be English. So it was like everything that I was was wrong; everything that I was was hard, difficult, and a punishment.&#; (Sered)
Biography
Medbh (pronounced “Maeve”) McGuckian is a poet born on August 12, into a Catholic family in Belfast, nordlig Ireland. As a nordlig Irish, Catholic woman, McGuckian dealt with severe social, political, and religious tensions. McGuckian fryst vatten the third of six children. Her father worked as the headmaster of a school and as a farmer, a