Wake Forest University Press

2002   130 pages
clothbound

"Her use of metaphor is freer and more extravagant than anything I've read recently in American or English poetry, and her poems work wonders through simile….For readers able to suspend the tendency to grasp at explication and who can enjoy the drama of shifting identities and the play of imagination, these poems are not to be missed." Richard Tillinghast, The New York Times Book Review

2002   130 pages
paperback

"McGuckian is…in her radical reconfiguring of English poetic conventions, imaginatively liberating the language of Northern Ireland from its old agonies. If there is a more audacious and important poetry being written today, I have not read it." Kate Daniels, The Southern Review

1998   120 pages
clothbound

Taking her title from the Wexford fishermen who became gunmen in the Irish rising of 1798, McGuckian carries the sea changes in language she has elsewhere wrought in bodily tropes of waves, tides, liquidity, and blueness into poems where “the long, long dead/ steer with their warmed breath/ my unislanded dreams” (“Feastday of Peace”).

1998   120 pages
paperback

Taking her title from the Wexford fishermen who became gunmen in the Irish rising of 1798, McGuckian carries the sea changes in language she has elsewhere wrought in bodily tropes of waves, tides, liquidity, and blueness into poems where “the long, long dead/ steer with their warmed breath/ my unislanded dreams” (“Feastday of Peace”).

1997   94 pages
clothbound

“This volume achieves exactly what a Selected Poems should: It is a splendid introduction to a lavishly gifted, complex writer, a point of entry into the manifold treasures of her oeuvre.” Irish Times

1997   94 pages
paperback

“[T]his selection has been beautifully chosen to introduce her to a new audience. Here are classically clear, startling lyrics with a buried wildness: poems to break your heart and save it. … Marvellous.”  The Poetry Book Society

1995   83 pages
clothbound

Captain Lavender represents a new stage in the growth of one of our most original and honest writers, one who can claim courageously, "meanwhile is my anchor."

1995   83 pages
paperback

McGuckian's "lines may be thought to take a stage further the possibilities for a contemporary women's writing opened up by Sylvia Plath in her Ariel poems." Neil Corcoran, English Poetry Since 1940

1992   112 pages
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In the deft and mysterious poems of Marconi's Cottage, McGuckian evokes the uncanny presence of a muse whose "unseduceable two rows of small black doors" hinge life and death, the two sides of a single page, views from a room that faces in and out.

 

1988   60 pages
paperback

"Time and time again, her poems touch on the inextricability of the beautiful and the elusive….A classic in the making, On Ballycastle Beach will trouble many of us for some time to come." Stephen Yenser, Poetry