Medbh McGuckian

Medbh McGuckian was born in 1950 to Catholic parents in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she now lives with her family. She studied with Seamus Heaney at Queen’s University, earning a BA and MA, and later returned as their first female writer-in-residence. She is the author of over 20 poetry collections including most recently Love, The Magician (2018), Blaris Moor (2015), The High Caul Cap (2012), and The Currach Requires No Harbours (2010). Her poems are layered collages of feminine and domestic imagery complicated by a liminal, active syntax that, in drawing attention to the weight of one phrase on another, emphasizes and questions our constructions of power and gender. Her work is reminiscent of Rainer Maria Rilke in its emotional scope and John Ashbery in its creation of rich interior landscapes. Praising McGuckian’s Selected Poems (1997), Heaney said, “Her language is like the inner lining of consciousness, the inner lining of English itself, and it moves amphibiously between the dreamlife and her actual domestic and historical experience as a woman in late-20th-century Ireland.”