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McGuckian stands out against other Northern Irish authors due to her extravagant poetry often seen as cryptic and impenetrable.¹ Literary critics agree on the difficulty of interpreting her work. Clair Wills argues that the "densely textured material" of McGuckian's poems may "conjure excitement at the possibilities opened up for imaginative exploration" or give rise to "condemnations of poetic egoism" but never leaves the reader indifferent.² Peter Sirr, on the contrary, maintains that McGuckian's poetic writing "resolutely refuses most of the norms readers have come to take for granted".³ Due to the absence of an "identifiable lyric centre" and an "underlying controlling voice",⁴ her poems often have a destabilising and confusing effect on the audience. McGuckian defends her individual way of writing with the fact of living in Northern Ireland: "My life has been […] pretty unliveable. So you wouldn't expect the poetry to be anything else but awkward."⁵ The poet further explains that she is less interested in being understood than in giving pleasure to the readers.⁶

DOI: 10.1057/9781137271723_4

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