EITHNE STRONG (1923-1999) MEDBH McGUCKIAN (b.

1950)

MEDBH McGUCKIAN
born in Northern Ireland

one of the first women to be recognized

among Northern voices - the Ulster poets who came to prominence in the seventies her first published volume was The Flower Master in 1982

MEDBH McGUCKIAN
from the very beginning, reviewers

praised the striking quality of her imagery, agreeing that her poems had something to do with womanliness readers found her poetry discursive, oblique, and, in some cases, incomprehensible

MEDBH McGUCKIAN
discontinuities of sense, sudden

changes of grammatical subject and tense; shifts in personal pronoun and the consequent indeterminacy of the speaking voice; startling juxtapositions and ellipses, etc.

MEDBH McGUCKIAN
refusing to be limited by a fixed I,

McGuckians poetry demands that we go with her into new territory. multiple figures continually appear and disappear in her poems, sisters, female and male lovers, husbands and wives, parents and children come together and separate, are born in die, in the landscape of her world

MEDBH McGUCKIAN
One of the most startling aspects of The

Flower Master is its focus on sexuality and the ways in which gender lines are sometimes blurred. Like Boland in In Her Own Image, she continually stresses the sexual nature of the subjects and speakers of these poems, and her flower images suggest both sex and gender roles.

MEDBH McGUCKIAN
in many of her poems, she gives the sun

and the rain male qualities she often makes links between he natural and human worlds The relationship between women and men, female and male lovers, reproduction and motherhood are all embodied in these images

MEDBH McGUCKIAN
Her women often move from one realm

to another trying to live several different kinds of lives houses, doors, rooms are prominent images. her speakers are often suspended between worlds

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Venus and the Rain (1984)

images of intercourse, conception, birth and

rebirth she links poems about pregnancy with those about writing poems the difficult process of creation expressing different versions of similar experiences McGuckians personae take us through stages of fertility from intercourse, with lover or with muse, through the difficulties of carrying to term (both baby and poem), to the release that birth represents

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On Ballycastle Beach (1988)

the personal merges with the political to

embody a woman poets commentary on the problems of her homeland Her political message becomes part of a larger framework constructed from a very broad definition of home.

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Marconis Cottage (1991)

full of multiple voices, highlighting the

tension arising from a womans double role as a mother and poet the desire, on the one hand, to have another child, and on the other to commit herself fully to writing

MEDBH McGUCKIAN
Her other collections:

Captain Lavender (1995), Shelmalier

(1998), The Soldiers of the Year II (2002), The Book of the Angel (2004), The Curragh Requires no Harbours (2007), My Love has Fared Inland (2010)

MEDBH McGUCKIAN
Generally speaking, her subject is

almost always the relationship between the different aspects of a womans life. concerned with the role of the woman artist within the larger framework of womens multiple lives.

EITHNE STRONG
Strong seemed to defy much of

conventional thinking about what the woman writer is or cold be It is often pointed to the conflict between a writing career and domestic and maternal duties. Strong managed to write almost without interruption while she raised nine children

EITHNE STRONG
produced several volumes of poetry in

both English and Irish; a novel, a collection of short stories, and numerous uncollected poems and stories Songs of Living (1961) her first collection of poems; a critic said that the poems were good because she does not write like a woman

EITHNE STRONG
an image of the ancient Spae-woman in which

she often combines attributes of the pagan goddesses and the Christian Virgin Mary transcending time and culture to create an image of woman that expresses complex physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual dimensions challenging the virginal model of the silent Blessed Mother, the ideal woman of Irish Catholicism, to express a more complex image

EITHNE STRONG
From A Woman Unleashed: Swift breed of sin All the lightning fire Hell in the breast A witchs Sabbath All the cauldron of gluttony and lust

EITHNE STRONG
She also introduces us to a maternal

world To my Mother another view of Irish women, undermining clichs about the unending joys of motherhood mothers also feel anger, pain, and sometimes give in to despair

EITHNE STRONG
Strong made her entrance into the world

of womens poetry, and the personae in these poems explore a wide range of human experiences and emotions from a specifically female perspective, one that had not been heard enough in modern Irish literature. Love, hatred, jealousy, pain, loss, sexual pleasure, children, rejection

EITHNE STRONG
Sarah, in Passing (1974) - her next volume

exploring motherhood, the anger, maternal

frustration, but also madness among women as they struggle to come to terms with the image they have inherited and the expectations they try to live up to. the most frequent images: those of mother and poet, complicated relationships between a mother and her children

EITHNE STRONG
Statement to Offspring Retarded Child FLESH...the Greatest Sin (1980) a fundamental work in the redefinition of the image of Irish womanhood other volumes: My Darling Neighbour (1985), Let Live (1990) and Spatial Nosing (1993) elaborating on the ideas and feelings of her earlier work

EITHNE STRONG
as she grows older, her female

personae age with her. In September Song, complaining of a stiff neck and poor eyesight, the speaker imagines herself with a new car:

EITHNE STRONG
With my laser view forward and my steady rear-view mirror, Ill still need boosting, will wish to keep clear of all the carrier trucks that brute the ground, ten-wheel furies to suck you in their violent pull and, like some memories, blast a courage mostly fear.

 transforming what she calls the chaos

of a domestic life into poetry that insists on the values of home and family, love and forgiveness a poetry that challenges us to confront the harsh realities of modern life, to look at what we are, and to understand that chaos is not restricted to domestic life.