Medbh McGuckian's abstract and challenging work has fascinated and puzzled readers in equal measure since she first began publishing in the 1980s. Her language describes, and dwells in, an inner world and retains the freedom to explore a multiplicity of identities and to respond to both real and imaginative worlds, past and present. The strangeness of McGuckian's language makes it memorable for the reader, and in this way the processes of memory and estrangement are closely woven into each poetic encounter. In keeping with these practices her engagement with acts of remembrance is oblique but, as I will argue in this chapter, both her recurring themes and compositional strategies are linked to a desire to alter the linear relationship between past, present and future in order that new ways of understanding experience can be achieved. In this way her poetic process privileges the practices of memory over those of the conventional historical narrative as her means of accessing the past depends upon its imaginative presence to both poet and reader.

The world of McGuckian's poetry is an intimate one in the relationship it suggests between the reader and the sensory world of the poem. Yet these works do not represent the self directly, nor do they interrogate ideas of selfhood except by abstract or associative means. This reflects the poet's convictions concerning the radical instability of language: as well as the subjective processes of writing and reading, McGuckian attributes these challenges to communication to ‘Irish and English and the language problem, and the way that the language was killed through the fighting, that the language was lost by that awful trauma but very recently, only one hundred and fifty years ago’.

This concern for the changing dynamics of language in Ireland is reflected in her metaphorical uses here, in her references to language being ‘killed’ and to the trauma of its loss. Unlike Mary O'Malley, who mourns the loss of the language but connects with it through place and landscape, McGuckian initiates more fundamental challenges to the contemporary lyric mode. Shane Murphy argues that the kind of decolonization in which McGuckian engages does not appropriate English but ‘deterritorialises the English language, subjecting it to a radical displacement’.