Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian

This coherent and cohesive study offers a new and insightful reading of McGuckian’s work, one which, without dismissing other critical approaches, contextualizes them within a new historical perspective: that of imposed silence on a partitioned territory and population. Fadem argues that by articulating a new poetic discourse, McGuckian conjures bad energies, and is able to represent Northern Ireland in all its complexities. It is, then, good news that we have a new full-length research monograph on the poetry of Medbh McGuckian, one that pays homage to a woman poet who never left the country, and who is nowadays considered one of the finest poets of her generation. * Irish Studies Review *
Fadem’s highly intriguing book offers important critical insights into McGuckian’s poetry highlighting the complex interaction between poetic form and historical context, and exploring the writing and reading processes as mutually interdependent aspects. Importantly, her monograph also provides an unprecedented, illuminating comparative angle—through the parallel with Celan—and reframes the (in)famous opacity of McGuckian’s poems in terms of their traumatic articulacy and performative silence, while positioning them in the context of specifically (Northern) Irish literary silences as well. Fadem’s study will become, without doubt, a cornerstone of McGuckian research, and scholars, students, and enthusiasts of Irish literature will most certainly find it an engaging reading, as will anyone interested in the relations of politico-historical trauma and poetic silence in general. * Hungarian Journal Of English and American Studies *
A breakthrough study, which combines a fine alertness to the local intensities of McGuckian's form and style with a sure understanding of the wider social forces out of which her works spring. This is a luminous, original analysis by a scholar who has the gift of explanation rather than simplification. -- Declan Kiberd, University of Notre Dame
Remarkable, revisionary, and beautifully written, Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian will be a landmark study of McGuckian’s oeuvre. A critical intervention made by this book is to place in perspective—hopefully for good—the debates about McGuckian’s intertextuality and to integrate that practice with the concerns structuring her work: trauma, silence and dispossession. -- David Lloyd, University of California, Riverside