Contemporary Poets: 29 Medbh McGuckian
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Your support makes all the difference.Born in 1950 in Belfast, where she was educated at the Queen's University and now lives with her family, Medbh McGuckian came to prominence when she won the National Poetry Competition in 1979 and afterwards published her first collection, The Flower Master. Her poetry is rhapsodic in its rhythms and often surrealistic in its imagery - describing what it means is never easy. But its central themes are impossible to mistake: domesticity and motherhood; religion and sexuality; the rich fecundities of nature and art. Her fourth and most recent collection, published by Bloodaxe last year, is Marconi's Cottage.
FIELD HEART
If I had dipped the tip of my finger
in water to cool your tongue,
you would have tasted salt off trees
forty miles from the sea.
Our voices in ordinary conversation
floated between farmhouses:
the pilot-light of a candle
burned in the open air
with no attempt to flicker.
Firmly-knit thatch
simply rested on the eaves
of its own permeable weight.
Slowly and steadily, the storm
that shared your name
reduced its current,
till every attentively incomprehending
tile of your skin
caught and flamed.
Nothing was to be seen through the closed lids
of your eventful dreaming,
the closed avenue of your new senses
beginning as absolute strangers
their ready-to-be-reaped, matured homecoming.
Through some friction with material substance,
like engaging a clutch, or intermeshing gears,
you turned the dew into something enchanted,
unbolted, a collapsible telescope,
a balloon untethered, a ball
from which the air has escaped.
You were now inside a lift
rising between two floors, no longer noticeable,
being whipped like the cork of a champagne bottle
out through a dark and narrow shaft
or rushing valley, into a higher frequency,
a faster vibration - into all the Irelands]
Bring your loosened soul near,
look through,
meet my day-consciousness
in the lawfulness of what is living:
return a different June to me -
once only, slide
until the union holds.
(Photograph omitted)
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