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“... Too Much Yellow Near-sighted, I would not lift my eyes From either my floor-length gown or my Pastel mood. There was too much yellow For my temperature to rise a lot At sunset into new mays and may nots: I was afraid to see the ever dancelike Breast of cloud swirl open in the sky As my garments. Promising a son, To him, to memory, I could not love His love, and all that came after Was a mere continuation of that August night I waited out the rain In someone’s gateway of sudden orphan- Hood where a flower shop had stood; Trying to make out his disobedient Window was the drawer for all its suffering Going in and out again as correctly as it should Like a child’s hand running in a man’s ...”

“... women, on the other hand, represent ‘the word made flesh, and flesh made whole’. And to read Medbh McGuckian you’d think he was right. This is écriture feminine with a vengeance. The trouble is that it confirms what men most complacently think about women: that they’re dreamy, irrational, mystical, maternal, domestic, garrulous, a bit ...”

“... suspends the historical consciousness that has seemed inescapable elsewhere in the book. Medbh McGuckian, by contrast, and unusually for an Ulster poet, avoids all issues of this kind in her work. Her poems are fabricated solely out of the textures of her inner experience, and tend to melt into each other across the page, drenching the reader in ...”

“... goods train, trundling a series of shackled-together images behind the engine of its main theme. Medbh McGuckian, occasionally linked with the Martians but from a different almost French Symbolist line, made her name as a bizarre and original talent some five years ago with a prize-winning poem called ‘The Flitting’, which ends with the memory of a ...”

“... the younger Irish women poets cited in Object Lessons: Eileen Ní Chuilleanáin, Paula Meehan and Medbh McGuckian. If these women are discouraged by history from becoming subjects in an Irish poem, they find syntactical and semantic means to new perspectives. As her latest book, Captain Lavender, brilliantly shows, ...”

“... contributors, but John Montague got him into the Faber anthology. Simmons Paulin, Ormsby, Carson, McGuckian ... the list goes on. Perhaps the most singular omission, though, is that of Michael Longley, whose Poems 1963-83, issued last year by the Salamander Press, shows a poet of incomparable fluency and discernment. When it comes to the Heaney selection ...”

“... from Eibhlin Dhubh Ni Chonaill and Mary Barber in the 18th century to Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Medbh McGuckian, with Maria Edgeworth, excellently introduced by W.J. MacCormack, the only woman to whom a whole section is devoted. This is by no means a lamentable showing, and the editors might argue that given the state of feminist history in Ireland in ...”

“... that, inter alia, Douglas Dunn, Craig Raine, Christopher Reid, Anne Stevenson, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian and James Fenton are absent because Davie thinks they play no significant part in this history, then what are we to make of the omissions of J.H. Prynne and Roy Fisher, heroes of Davie’s earlier study of the contemporary, Thomas Hardy and ...”

“... True Story’, about British social prejudice and his own relationship to this, as an Irishman. In Medbh McGuckian the emotion is not sufficiently reined, and dictates an intensely personal and impenetrable kind of work. The pre-eminent talent of this anthology, however, is Michael Hofmann, its youngest contributor. Though his work is somewhat pleased ...”

“... Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Derek Mahon, Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Elaine Feinstein are all variously represented, opening out the Sixties, Seventies and ...”

“... them Sidney Greenbaum and Randolph Quirk) jostle with poets and novelists (including Medbh McGuckian and Amy Tan). David Dabydeen writes ‘On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today’, and discusses, in impeccably establishment English, a question that might just as well come under ‘Art’: how does a black writer in English find ...”

“... or her famous ‘Blackberrying’, with the poems in the present collection by Penelope Shuttle or Medbh McGuckian. All three poets seem to be doing much the same thing and doing it well. Their interest in and skill with words in relation to objects in their daily living are like the meticulous recipes in Colour Supplements and the perfect photographs of ...”