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").

In poems that warm history into the living and breathing voice, the space of the body into time itself ("making addresses into dates"), McGuckian transforms the rebels' "still unused voices" into "soon-to-be-living words" ("Rose Trellis") that may yet resonate in an island where hope itself remains difficult two centuries later.

The Word-Thrower

These two fears unite us —
the deaths for which he is wrongly blamed,
the three people I know myself to have been.

The people he loves in the past are himself,
not a real person, not a ghost, my someone,
no one I had ever loved was real.

I heard my voice talking to the dream-voice
from the pillow; I let the days overlap and swim
out to sea, as though bitten by the past.

The less dark air and the shadows pair:
the light calms the air around the colours
that darken sweetly, little by little.

$17.95 clothbound
ISBN 0-916390-87-X
ISBN13 978-0-916390-87-7

$11.95 paperback
ISBN 0-916390-86-1
ISBN13 978-0-916390-86-0

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