'Belfast-born Medbh McGuckian's new collection Drawing Ballerinas consolidates what is already an achieved and unique presence in Irish poetry. Her mind is astonishing -- within her world Kafka dines comfortably with Vita Sackville-West. All of her work has that sense of clairvoyance, of being able to apprehend more than what is offered and obvious in everyday life.'
                                                                                                           — Thomas McCarthy, Cork Literary Review

This poet challenges the reader with poems you must read like fire-flames -- fascinating, glimmering experiences that conjure surreal images dissolving into each other with such mental speed that on first reading you receive the sensation, the emotional charge, the imagery, without being at all certain of the poem's actuality. . . Through these disturbing, amusing, often caustic poems runs a powerful affirmative undertone, a sense of the poet's own courage, her reliance on the power of her art to discover and relate the truth, even in extremis, even as she follows the example of Matisse in wartime, surviving aesthetically by 'drawing ballerinas'.
                                                                                                          — James J. McAuley, Poetry Ireland Review