In Marconi’s Cottage Medbh McGuckian describes the drama of the domesticated mother’s endeavour to be or to become a free, autonomous artist and continues her investigation into the relationship between feminine and masculine principles. A sequence of poems mourning the apparent sacrifice of one fertility to the other is followed by a spate of poems which celebrate the physical and culminate in actual birth. As Molly Bendell writes in The Antioch Review, ‘The beauty and genius of (her) poems continually redefine our notions of poetry.’ Romantic and religious, Medbh McGuckian chronicles the conditions of her life and the loss and recovery of self in poems that are challenging, mesmerizing and rewarding.
