Medbh McGuckian is the doyenne of poets of her generation. In The Currach Requires No Harbours, her eleventh groundbreaking collection, there is a new urgency, an acceleration of stanza, line and utterance: ‘All my weariness of the North / revived with double force . . .’
The book opens with a record of injury and the consequent prayers for her daughter. It proceeds through a series of self-portraits and invocations of women, with their folk instructions and remedies, to construct an historical narrative. Its journey comes to rest in a series of consoling ‘island’ poems. Medbh McGuckian’s code of allegiance to the course of her imagination — see her variations on the colour blue — and the illuminating sensitivity and ardour of her work have fashioned an opus unlike any other. In the unfolding of sense and sentences she is as much a composer of atmosphere and feeling as a maker of poems.
‘These poetic recalibrations, both subtle and subversive set The Currach Requires No Harbours apart from her other recent collections and confirm McGuckian as a poet whose verse is as innovative as it is discomfiting.’
– Heather Clark, Harvard Review
