The Thankless Paths to Freedom

Has there been a more thankless path in recent history than the one we are on now? Medbh McGuckian’ s newest volume asks this question, conceived in the years between the centenary anniversaries of the 1916 Rising and the establishment of the Northern Irish State in 1921. Poems are preoccupied with imprisonment, from the County Down Maze Prison to the sentencing of revolutionary nationalist Constance Markievicz, as violence mingles with a dreamlike glow: “ The unintended beauty of this map / of bomb damage.” McGuckian’ s familiar angels flutter at the edges of poems alongside images of Mars and the earth-like alternate universe of Kepler452b. An invisible illness haunts many of the poems— “ One longs to go to a hospital and have something / cut out.” Written between personal and public histories, based in both borrowings and startling associations, McGuckian continues to craft a singular lyric subjectivity open to the multiplicity of experience: When I was in my right mind my body was doing its best without me— when I say ‘ talking to myself’ I mean there are two of me. — From “ The Plume Trade”